Joanna Bruzdowicz

Joanna Bruzdowicz comes from a musical family: her father was an architect and cellist, her mother a pianist. Bruzdowicz started her musical career as a child prodigy when she began to compose at the age of six. Interestingly, she later dedicated much of her efforts to promoting music for the youth. She studied at the Warsaw Music High School, at the State Higher School of Music (composition with Kazimierz Sikorski and piano with Irena Protasewicz and Wanda Łosakiewicz), earning her M.A. in 1966. She traveled to Paris to continue her studies on a scholarship from the French government and became a student of Nadia Boulanger, Oliver Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer (1968-70). While in Paris, she joined the electro-acoustic Groupe de Recherches Musicales and wrote her doctoral thesis Mathematics and Logic in Contemporary Music at the Sorbonne. After completing her studies in France, she settled in Belgium and established herself as a composer there before resettling permanently in southern France. Joanna Bruzdowicz with a fellow female composer of another heritage, Lithuanian-Canadian composer and USC professor Veronika Krausas, during her visit for the PMC’s Festival of Premieres in March 2012. Photo: Krysta Close, PMC Archives Alongside Grażyna Bacewicz , Anna Maria Klechniowska, Bernardetta Matuszczak , Barbara Niewiadomska and Marta Ptaszyńska , Bruzdowicz was one of several Polish women studying with Nadia Boulanger. Boulanger’s advice was very firm and non-compromising: she insisted that composers have no right to self-pity or self-indulgence, but solely the right to work, work, work. This principle was internalized by her most talented students, such as Bacewicz, Bruzdowicz or Ptaszyńska, and expressed in their intensely focused work habits that resulted in the high volume and quality of their output. As a composer Bruzdowicz devoted her attention to opera, symphonic and chamber music, works for children, and music for film and television. She wrote a number of concerti and chamber pieces, as well as over 25 hours of film music. Her compositions are featured on 12 CDs and over 20 LPs; she has been featured in TV programs produced in Belgium, France, Germany and Poland. Bruzdowicz’s music has been praised for its “poetic palette of sound” and its qualities of being “ultramodern and refined” while remaining expressive and personal. Her output includes several operas which brought to the stage some of the greatest works of European literature, including The Penal Colony , after Kafka, 1972; The Women of Troy after Euripides, 1973; and The Gates of Paradise , after Jerzy Andrzejewski, 1987. Bruzdowicz with Wanda Wilk and Jürgen Tittel. Photo by Maja Trochimczyk, 2001. Bruzdowicz was the only Polish composer and the only woman selected to the final round of 12 composers who were invited to create a new Hymn for the Vatican. Her Stabat Mater written in 1993 for a special ceremony held at Forest Lawn Memorial in Glendale, California (unveiling in a restored theatre Jan Styka’s monumental panorama of the Crucifixion , commissioned by Paderewski) was attended by the representatives of the city and county, and the Polish government, among over one thousand of guests. This choral work is dedicated to PMC founder Wanda Wilk . In 2001 Bruzdowicz received the highest distinction from the Polish government—the Order of Polonia Restituta—for her contributions to Polish culture. Promoting Polish music is her passion and she has produced hours of radio programs devoted to this subject for radio stations in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the U.S. Joanna Bruzdowicz also co-founded various musical organizations: Chopin-Szymanowski Association in Belgium, Jeunesses Musicales in Poland, GIMEP in France, andInternational Encounters in Music in Catalonia. Thanks to her efforts, numerous Polish composers received their first performances in Europe and the U.S. One of her most notable projects was a December 1985 concert held during