Songs
The thought of bringing up this subject at Warsaw Autumn emerged several years ago and later frequently resurfaced until now a suitable moment has come to take it up in the context of the leitmotif of this year's festival. The initial plan was simple: To invite a renowned ensemble specialising in new music and make them collaborate on the project with a selected group of popular singers and music composers. This idea was soon abandoned, though, since such configurations have cropped up at the festival for many years now, and, besides, the point was not merely to write and perform songs, but to incorporate the broader aesthetic categories that characterise popular music performers. A new concept therefore appeared: To invite an entire band from the popular music scene and ask composers to write songs for such amateur performers. The band needed to represent a highly distinctive aesthetic, sound, and type of expression. Hańba! was chosen as fulfilling all these criteria.
Specially for this concert, Grzegorz Uzdański wrote lyrics that unify the whole programme. The songwriter has perfectly captured the band's rhetorical mode. This time, its austere simplicity is not meant to transport us several decades back, into a different musical era, as this punk-folk band has consistently done before in its own music. Instead, the lyrics are set in present-day reality. This, then, is the context of an unprecedented project – the first-ever Warsaw Autumn concert dedicated to “light” songs. Hańba means “disgrace” – but is it, really?
Artur Zagajewski Curator of the concert
Music
The challenge described above was undertaken by creators from various generations and aesthetics:
Lyrics
The song lyrics were written by Grzegorz Uzdański — he is the author of the novels Wakacje (Holidays, a Conrad Award nomination), Zaraz będzie po wszystkim (It'll Be Over Soon, 2019), and Wypiór (2021, Polityka Passport nomination). He also authored the website New Poems by Famous Poets (published as a book in 2021). He is active in the improvised comedy scene (Klancyk, Resort Komedii, Kolektyw Śmiesznie). His other works include Sen na gapę (Stowaway Dream) for Warsaw's Guliwer Puppet Theatre (2023, dir. Robert Drobniuch) and the text for the musical fable King Matt the First after Janusz Korczak (2019, music by Jerzy Rogiewicz). In 2018–23 he was a regular collaborator of the Przekrój quarterly.
The poems proposed by Grzegorz are "a polyphony for Warsaw, which does not sleep, though it would like to, and it's about people and times, as well as non-people and other times. And about us, but also not about us, and thank goodness, not everything should really be about us" (quote from Emilia Dłużewska's review).
The pieces tell the story of an unspecified morning in Warsaw, observed from the perspective of 10 characters. We get to know their names, problems, emotions, and hopes. Importantly, the composers did not consult each other on the character of the individual pieces, and their final form and cohesive combination is the result of collaboration with Hańba!, the ultimate interpreters and performers of the Warsaw story.
