Zygmunt Noskowski - Humorous Quartet "Any Way You Like it" (Four Strings Quartet)

Zygmunt Noskowski - Kwartet humorystyczny: Każdy po swojemu
Written in 1873
Performance by the Four Strings Quartet:
1st Violin: Lucyna Fiedukiewicz
2nd Violin: Grzegorz Witek
Viola: Beata Raszewska
Cello: Łukasz Tudzierz
Zygmunt Noskowski was a Polish Composer who was born in Warsaw and lived from 1846-1909. He was known mostly for his symphonic compositions. He worked not only as a musician, but as a teacher and a journalist. He taught almost all of the most important composers of the next generation in Polish music. It is through his efforts primarily that symphonic music was introduced to Warsaw, and he built the foundations for a strong symphonic tradition in Poland [1].
At the time of his birth, Poland was divided between Austria, Prussia, and the Russian Empire. Conditions were difficult for Polish artists due to censorship and general repression of Polish culture. Noskowski himself was a witness of a pogrom against the "manifestations of patriotism" (pogrom manifestacji patriotycznej) conducted by Russian soldiers on the 27th of February 1861 in Warsaw.
After witnessing the events, he traveled to Kraków and visited the Tatra mountains. These events influenced the rest of his creative output. The sights of the mountains and the beauty of Kraków juxtaposed with the foreign oppression that he saw could not be discounted easily, given that he later joined the January Uprising after his father's death in 1863.
Interestingly, Noskowski was not well aware of Chopin's output. His mother was a dedicated supporter of Towiański, who was a messianic, apocalyptic religious leader in Poland who claimed he had a vision of the end times. Chopin was highly critical of Towiański, which led Noskowski's family to avoid his work. Noskowski would detach from Towianism later in his life and become a propagator of Chopin's music. In the meantime, however, he still saw Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński as the model Polish composer. Stylistically, he absorbed much of Dobrzyński's style as well as those of his other teachers - Kątski, Moniuszko, and Kiel.
The Humorous Quartet
String quartets were somewhat of a rarity in Polish music after the November Uprising. A group of musicians sensitive to the vacuum that had emerged in Polish society sought to change that by organizing chamber concerts via the Warsaw Musical Society founded in 1871 [2]. These chamber concerts exercised a dual purpose: to make chamber music heard more broadly and to propagate new Polish music written by members of the society, who had their own quartet in which Noskowski played the viola [3]. The legendary pedagogue wrote many chamber works for this setting.
Noskowski's last composition for string quartet was by far his most unusual, but for students of the Musical Institute of Warsaw, it was something expectedly unexpected. Every year, the Warsaw Musical Society String Quartet had a tradition to celebrate the feast day of Saint Cecilia by appearing in the Institute and playing some kind of harmonized, improvisational chaos - each player playing a bit from some different piece [2]. Noskowski's quartet is a collection of dances that abruptly end before a new dance appears with a completely different mood, likely to the dancers' chagrin.
[1] Wroński, Witold. Zygmunt Noskowski. Warsaw: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1960.
[2] J. Gołębiowska. Kwartet smyczkowy w muzyce polskiej XIX wieku. Universytet im. Adama Mickiewicza. Wydział Historyczny. Praca Doktorska. Poznań. 2014.
[3] F. Starostka, "Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła: Discovering the Life and Music of Zygmunt Noskowski," Ph. D. dissertation. LSU, Baton Rouge, USA, 2021.

[@andrzejchmielewski392]

Każdy po swojemu - that's the best definition! Thank you very much, it's awesome! Dziękuję bardzo!