Rafał Augustyn

Biography

Rafał Augustyn (born 28 August 1951) is a Polish composer of classical music, pianist, music critic, writer and scholar of Polish philology. As a composer, he has written symphonies, chamber orchestra works, vocal and electronic music, as well as music for theatre. Since the mid-1990s, Augustyn has collaborated with visual artists, architects and photographers on numerous multimedia artworks.

Education and career

Augustyn was born on 28 August 1951 in Wrocław, Poland. He studied composition under Ryszard Bukowski at the State Higher School of Music in Wrocław between 1971 and 1974, and between 1975 and 1977 at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice, where he studied under Henryk Górecki. In 1979, Augustyn began to teach at the Institute of Polish Philology at Wrocław University and has remained there since. His works have had numerous performances at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, as well as at other Polish festivals, and across Europe, North America and the Far East. As a music writer and critic, he has written for such journals and periodicals as Ruch Muzyczny and Odra.
As a music critic, he has also published reviews in music and literary press and has appeared on Polish Radio and Television. In 1984–94, together with Marek Pijarowski, he was director of the "Musica Polonica Nova" Festival of Polish Contemporary Music in Wrocław. In 1980–98 he was a member of the Repertoire Committee of the "Warsaw Autumn" International Festival of Contemporary Music. He was co-founder of the "Brevis" Music Publishers.

Style

Along with Andrzej Krzanowski and Eugeniusz Knapik, Augustyn is sometimes included as a member of the so-called "Silesian School"; that is, a group of composers who studied under Górecki in Katowice, Silesia, and are noted for their break with the current dominant postmodernist approach to classical music in Poland.
One of his major pieces, his "Symphony of Hymns", took 20 years to complete, typically lasts for 100 minutes and requires an orchestra of over 170 players. It was described in 2004 by the music critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson as,

"a monster of a work....[but] has that broad sweeping feel of neo-Romanticism that one might expect from a contemporary Polish symphonist, although it features none of Górecki’s direct simplicity or Penderecki’s gloomy ponderousness. It does however...continually blur the line between orchestration and form. Melody and harmony are present, but not discernible as such; more important is a lilting shifting of colours that tumbles the music forward."