Authors

Writer, translator, and lecturer, born in 1972 in Kraków. He graduated in Polish philology from the Jagiellonian University, later obtaining his doctoral and postdoctoral degrees in the humanities. He is now a professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies in his alma mater, where he teaches literary theory, rhetoric, and creative writing. Rusinek writes features for the press, poems, radio and TV scripts, song lyrics and libretti.

Composer, improviser, and musical event organiser. He studied composition with Tadeusz Baird and
Marian Borkowski at the Warsaw Academy of Music. He continued his education with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.

An eminent composer and violin virtuoso, proficient pianist and writer (born on 5th February 1909 in Łódź, died on 17th January 1969 in Warsaw). She received excellent music education, learning first from her father, later at Halina Kijeńska’s private conservatory in Łódź, and finally at Warsaw Conservatory with Kazimierz Sikorski (composition) and Józef Jarzębski (violin). She continued her studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (composition), André Touret and Carl Flesch (violin)

Jazz violinist and composer. Already in his teens, he attracted attention with the extraordinary potential of his musical talent. Having graduated with an honours degree from Henryk Gembalski’s class
at the Katowice Academy of Music, he obtained a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music.

Canadian-born bassist, bandleader, and composer, also a curator and educator who thrives in many musical worlds. Drawing upon his experience in jazz, classical, punk and hardcore, Arabic, and improvised music, Michael Bates has composed and recorded a catalogue that often defies categories. A New Yorker for over twenty years, Bates can be found in the heart of several music scenes as both a bandleader and sideman.

Founded on Jarosław Bester’s initiative in 1997 as The Cracow Klezmer Band, it consists of four eminent instrumentalists with classical and jazz education, playing a stylistically highly varied repertoire which assimilates elements of classical, jazz, avant-garde, and contemporary chamber music. Improvisation plays a major role in their work as a form-building element and the band’s musical axis.

Called a brilliant inventor and creator of new worlds, but also a showman and a charlatan, Cage shocked the world with his experiments, but after him art could no longer be the same. A radical and a rebel, he strove to break away from tradition in all its aspects.

Poland’s most eminent composer, ‘poet of the piano’, was born on 1st March (according to his own declara- tions) or 22nd February (as the baptismal certificate states) 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, to the music-loving family of Polonised Frenchman Mikołaj (Nicolas) Chopin and his wife Tekla Justyna née Krzyżanow- ska.