Sikora, Elżbieta (EN)

Sikora Elżbieta, *20 October 1943 Lviv, Polish composer. In 1963–68, she studied at the Department of Music Directing at the State Higher School of Music in Warsaw, and after obtaining her diploma, she went to Paris, where from 1968 to 1970, she studied electroacoustic music at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales under the supervision of P. Schaeffer and F. Bayle. After returning to Warsaw, she studied composition under the supervision of T. Baird and Z. Rudziński, obtaining her diploma in 1977. Together with K. Knittel and W. Michniewski in 1973, she founded the composition group KEW, with which she performed until 1976, giving concerts in Poland (including the experimental improvisation Drugi poemat tajemnicy, Warsaw Autumn Festival 1974), Sweden, Austria and the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1981, she moved to France, where, as a scholarship holder of the French government, she attended a course in computer music at the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), and then studied composition with B. Jolas (1982–83). She was also a scholarship holder of the city of Mannheim (1982) and the Kościuszko Foundation (1983–84), thanks to which she worked for several months under the supervision of J. Chowning at the Center for Computer Research for Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University (California). In 1999, she received a Ph.D. from the Academy of Music in Wrocław. In 1985–99, she was a professor of electroacoustic composition and sound art at the Angoulême Conservatory and School of Fine Arts. She also taught composition at the Institute Charles Gros in Marne la Vallée (France) and at the University of Chicago (2004), as well as during workshops in Munich, Mannheim, Ulm and Gdańsk (International Workshops on Contemporary Music).

Sikora received 2^nd Prize at the Weber Competition in Dresden in 1978 for the chamber opera Ariadne; in 1980, she received distinctions at the Electroacoustic Music Competition in Bourges for The Waste Land and Listy do M.; in 1982, 1^st Prize at the competition for female composers in Mannheim for the piece Guernica, hommage à Pablo Picasso; in 1999, the Prix Magistère of the Electroacoustic Music Festival in Bourges and in 1994 two SACEM awards: Prix de la Partition Pédagogique for Chant Europe and Prix du Printemps for her entire oeuvre; in 1996, the French prize of the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) in Paris for the opera L’Arrache-coeur and in 2000 the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis. In 2003, a recording of her works by Le Chant du Mond received a special distinction from the Académie du Disque Lyrique in Paris. In 1997, Sikora was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, and in 2004 she was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.

Sikora’s creative attitude was initially greatly influenced by contact with P. Schaeffer and his “musique concrète,” which was evident in tape works created according to the method proposed by the French composer. Unlike the precursors of electronic music, often fascinated by the purely technical aspect, Sikora’s explorations were characterised by a more humanistic trait. Here, the emphasis is clearly on the semantic, imaginative and emotional dimension of the music created, and at the same time, sensitivity to the sensual values ​​of sound, and its multidimensional, spatial and dynamic aspects. In works in which traditional instrumentation is combined with electronic media, the tape sometimes contains more literal references to a specific environment, e.g. in Lisboa, tramway 28, where sounds recorded during a tram ride on the route used by F. Pessoa are used. In the sound environment created in this way, an improvisational saxophone part develops.

Compositions for tape using the human voice are characterised by a lyrical, poetic atmosphere (e.g. The Waste Land) created from interwoven fragments of literary text, harmonising with the electroacoustic layer. The form of these compositions has much in common with a radio play, which in the case of Eine Rose als Stütze was indicated in the title. Sikora also uses her experience in electronic music in works intended for traditional instruments, trying, for example, to obtain sounds similar to noise and other artificially generated sounds. The texture shows a tendency to operate with sound bands similarly to modules in an electronic piece, and in terms of form, the composer uses fast, montage sequences of episodes. References to music from the past appearing in Sikora’s instrumental compositions, as in the case of pieces for tape, can be treated as elements of the musical background, the sound environment with which a given piece “corresponds,” rather than as examples of a typically postmodern play with convention. In the later period of her work, which the composer herself called her “personal pact with tradition,” there is a tendency to construct larger cyclical forms, an example of which is the Piano Concerto.

Sikora’s tendency towards multimedia, theatrical or paratheatrical forms, already present in the earlier, more experimental stage, found fuller expression in the opera Wyrywacz serc (L’Arrache-cœur), based on the prose by B. Vian, in which the world of perverted emotions and unnatural behaviour of the characters clashes with the poetics of a rather conventionally treated musical layer.