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Adrian Thomas is Emeritus Professor of Music at Cardiff University School of Music. He specializes in Polish Music.
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Adrian Thomas is Emeritus Professor of Music at Cardiff University School of Music. He specializes in Polish Music.
Thomas began his professional career at Queen's University Belfast in 1973. Between 1983 and 1984, he was a visiting fellow at University of California, San Diego, and after his return to Queen’s University he became the Hamilton Harty Professor of Music in 1985. He held this position until 1996, when he took up his role at Cardiff University. He retired in 2010.
In addition to this, in 1983, 1986 and 1987, he held composition fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Between 2003 and 2006, Thomas was the Professor of Music at Gresham College in London.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Thomas conducted concerts with the Ulster Orchestra and contemporary music ensembles such as Lontano. In the 1980s he had several compositions broadcast by BBC Radio 3, including a commission for the BBC Singers, Black Rainbow (1989). In 1990-93 he was seconded by Queen’s University to the BBC, to become the Head of Music for BBC Radio 3, where, in 1993, he initiated the music and arts festival, Polska!, a nationwide celebration of Polish music and culture.
Between 2003 and 2006, as Gresham Professor of Music, Thomas delivered series of public lectures on Polish and Central European music. He was subsequently elected a Fellow of Gresham College (2006–09) and Emeritus Professor in 2009.
He has served on public committees and boards at the Arts Councils in Northern Ireland and Wales and on the Research Panel for the Performing Arts at the Arts and Humanities Research Board (2000–03).
Adrian Thomas is a specialist on Polish music and has published widely on the topic. He has given research papers, public talks and broadcasts in Europe, the USA and Australia. He is the author of over fifty entries on twentieth-century Polish music in the Second Edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2000–01). For his 1997 book, Górecki, Thomas received the Wilk Book Prize for Research in Polish Music (2002). He has received awards from the Polish Composers' Union (1989), the Polish Government (Order of Merit for Polish Culture, 1996) and the Lutosławski Society in Warsaw (2005).
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Henryk Mikołaj Górecki was a Polish composer of contemporary classical music. According to critic Alex Ross, no recent classical composer has had as much commercial success as Górecki. He became a leading figure of the Polish avant-garde during the post-Stalin cultural thaw. His Anton Webern-influenced serialist works of the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by adherence to dissonant modernism and influenced by Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Kazimierz Serocki. He continued in this direction throughout the 1960s, but by the mid-1970s had changed to a less complex sacred minimalist sound, exemplified by the transitional Symphony No. 2 and the Symphony No. 3. This later style developed through several other distinct phases, from such works as his 1979 Beatus Vir, to the 1981 choral hymn Miserere, the 1993 Kleines Requiem für eine Polka and his requiem Good Night.
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Bolesław Szabelski was a Polish composer of modern classical music. While his style shifted and varied over the course of his life, he is best known for his atonal work composed during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Maja Trochimczyk is an American music historian, writer and poet of Polish descent. She published six poetry books: Rose Always – A Love Story, 2017; Miriam's Iris, or Angels in the Garden, 2008; Slicing the Bread: Children's Survival Manual in 25 Poems ; Into Light: Poems and Incantations; The Rainy Bread – Poems from Exile,, 2016; an anthology Chopin with Cherries, 2010), and a multi-faith anthology Meditations on Divine Names.
Totus Tuus Op. 60 was written for unaccompanied mixed choir by the Polish composer Henryk Górecki in 1987. Górecki composed the piece to celebrate Pope John Paul II's third pilgrimage to his native Poland that summer, and the work remains his best-known, if not critically acclaimed, a cappella choral piece of the 1980s. Indeed, Totus Tuus has been described as a contemporary classic.
Two Sacred Songs, Op. 30 is a 1971 work by the Polish composer Henryk Górecki for baritone and piano; the lyrics are two poems in Polish by Marek Skwarnicki. Although the music demonstrates the sacred and contemplative aspect of Górecki's music, the piece still bears the traces of the earlier period of Górecki's composition, as is marked by a more violent and dissonant aspects of the work.
Eugeniusz Knapik is a Polish pianist and composer of classical music best known for his 1980 chamber piece String Quartet No. 1. Knapik studied composition and piano with Henryk Górecki (1933–2010) and Czesław Stańczyk at the University of Music in Katowice. Archived 2007-12-26 at the Wayback Machine". Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Retrieved on June 1, 2009. As a pianist he has recorded widely, specialising mainly in 20th-century music. He has won numerous prizes for his compositions, including at the Festival of Polish Piano Interpretation in Słupsk, and the International Chamber Music Competition in Vienna.
Arnold Whittall is a British musicologist and writer. He is Professor Emeritus at King's College London. Between 1975 and 1996 he was Professor at King's. Previously he lectured at Cambridge, Nottingham (1964–1969) and Cardiff (1969–1975), where one of his students was Australian composer Norma Tyer.
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Raymond Flood is Emeritus Fellow and a member of the Continuing Education Department at Kellogg College, Oxford, and has been a Professor of Geometry at Gresham College.
The Polish School is the music of several post-1945 Polish composers who share generational and stylistic similarities. Representatives include Tadeusz Baird, Henryk Górecki, Wojciech Kilar, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Grażyna Bacewicz, and Kazimierz Serocki. According to Polish music scholar Adrian Thomas, Zygmunt Mycielski used the term at the Łagów conference in 1949, and it was later used at the 1956 Warsaw Autumn festival. Their common purpose was in part retrospective, reacting to socialist realism, and in part speculative. Sound mass and sonorism influenced these post-war composers.
