“Newcomers” and “natives”: composers in Polish Zielona Góra (1945–2023)

Abstract Zielona Góra is a city with 140,000 inhabitants and an 800-year history. Only for almost eighty years has it been a Polish city, replacing the German Grünberg as a result of the end of World War II. From 1945 until the end of the 1970s, the city was inhabited by Poles and the former German natives of the city had to leave it. Polish newcomers brought their culture with them, so initially the German traces were definitely erased, and then Polish-German cultural exchange gradually began. Over time, the group of Polish musical newcomers was also joined by Polish musical natives born in the Zielona Góra. The aim of the considerations is to present the musical history of the city through the composer’s activity. The group of composers is small, its consists of ten people, including: Andrzej Banachowicz, Mirosław Andrzej Bukowski, Czesław Grabowski, Zygmunt Herembeszta, Juliusz Stefan Karcz, Katarzyna Kwiecień-Długosz, Stanisław Leśniewski, Roman Mazurkiewicz, Andrzej Tuchowski, Narcyz Żołnowski. The Lexicon of Polish Composers edited by Marek Podhajski and other Polish dictionaries, encyclopedias and lexicons in most cases do not contain information about composers from Zielona Góra. There are only four articles: one by Juliusz Karcz and three by Barbara Literska. Two of them concern the period up to 1998, and the next two concern the works of Katarzyna Kwiecień-Długosz. Sources for this discussion also include archival and Internet materials, and information obtained directly from composers. In this discussion, I want to present well-known figures (Banachowicz, Grabowski, Karcz, Kwiecień-Długosz, Tuchowski), and less known ones (Bukowski, Herembeszta, Mazurkiewicz, Żołnowski), and new ones (Leśniewski). For this reason, this text is an alphabetical composer’s lexicon. Therefore, it fulfills the old plans of SK LTM members to publish an almanac of composers from Zielona Góra. These are excellent artists with extensive achievements, known in Poland and abroad. From the perspective of almost 80 years of Polish Zielona Góra, we see what kind of socio-demographic experiment German natives and Polish newcomers participated in. The development of the city›s musical culture is also astonishing, thanks to these people.