About the Foundation

      OUR ACTIVITIES

• Concerts of 20th- and 21st-century music, featuring outstanding selections from the newer and most recent world repertoire and works by Polish composers, performed by leading Polish specialists in contemporary repertoire, as well as international musicians. The programs of these events include works considered among the most important musical works of recent decades, such as Arnold Schönberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire“, Pierre Boulez’s “Improvisations sur Mallarmé“, “Anthèmes 2“ and “Dialogue de l’ombre double“, Mauricio Kagel’s “Stücke der Windrose”, Jonathan Harvey’s “Bhakti“, Gérard Grisey’s “Vortex temporum“, Olga Neuwirth’s “Maudite soit la guerre“, and many others, including works by Polish composers such as Aleksandra Słyż, Włodzimierz Kotoński, Tadeusz Wielecki, Paweł Mykietyn, and Artur Zagajewski. Performers included conductor Szymon Bywalec, singer Joanna Freszel, pianists Adam Kośmieja and Martyna Zakrzewska, violinist Anna Kwiatkowska, flautist Ewa Liebchen, cellist Mikołaj Pałosz, clarinetist Julian Paprocki, percussionists Miłosz Pękala and Magdalena Kordylasińska, and renowned international musicians from countries including Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Iran, Germany, Norway, Germany, Italy, and others. Concerts organized by the Foundation have taken place at major Polish contemporary music festivals (Warsaw Autumn, Codes in Lublin, Poznań Musical Spring, Musica Polonica Nova in Wrocław, Neoarte in Gdańsk, Audio Art in Kraków) and in many other venues in Poland and abroad (Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, China). Since 2012, the Foundation has organised over 90 concerts, many of which took place as part of thematic events organised by the Foundation, including lectures and seminars, such as the Days of New Finnish Music (Krakow, 2012), Norwegian Music (Krakow 2024), concerts on microtonal music (Kraków, 2014), and monographic events devoted to the music of Luciano Berio, Hanns Eisler, Barbara Buczek, Pierre Boulez, and Włodzimierz Kotoński, organised in cooperation with the Academy of Music in Kraków.
• In 2022, thanks to support from the EEA Culture program (Norway funds), the Foundation initiated the Summer Courses of New Music for Young Performers, which take place for ten days annually in Bydgoszcz in cooperation with the local Academy of Music. Each year, approximately 60 students and pupils of secondary music schools participate, with lecturers from leading Polish performers of new music. The course sessions are accompanied by concerts by lecturers and participants. The high level of skill and motivation of the young musicians resulted in the formation of a Young Orchestra composed of course participants, which in 2024 gave four concerts, including at the Nowa Miodowa Concert Hall in Warsaw and the Concert Hall of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice. In 2025, the Foundation organized four concerts in Krakow and Warsaw, where lecturers and course participants performed in jointly prepared programs.
• “”Dzwiękowisko” (“Sonic Playground”) Project (since 2014): a series of workshops/concerts initiated in collaboration with the Institute of Music and Dance. The aim of the workshops is to prepare and premiere ensemble works composed specifically for joint performance by Polish orchestras, ensembles, and soloists, as well as students from general and music schools. Each project invites a different composer and a different group of students from a selected school. The workshops last several days. They consist of a series of joint rehearsals, public performances, and a reportage documenting all phases of project work. The events took place in Radom, Łomża, Kielce, Łódź, Kraków, and Warsaw. As part of the program, the Foundation commissioned over 20 participatory works by leading Polish composers, including Lidia Zielińska, Krzysztof Knittel, Mateusz Ryczek, Katarzyna Głowicka, and Marek Chołoniewski.
• International cooperation is an important part of the Foundation’s activities. This has included educational workshops and concerts organized jointly with the MusikFabrik ensemble from Cologne. Since 2019, the Foundation has participated in international programs initiated by CoMA (Contemporary Music for All), based in London. This organization aims to promote contemporary works intended for performance by non-professional musicians (children, youth, adults, and seniors). As part of this cooperation, the Foundation promotes participatory Polish works by offering them for performance at CoMA events in the UK and other European countries. An important partner of the Foundation is the BIT20 ensemble from Bergen, Norway, with whom it co-organized numerous events from 2022-2024 as part of the jointly developed series “New Music, New Artists, New Audience”, co-financed by a grant from the Culture Programme of the European Economic Area Financial Mechanism. These included collaborations between musicians from Poland and Norway with young musicians from both countries just starting their artistic careers, concerts promoting the music of Iranian female composers (with artists from Iran participating), concerts of Polish music in Norway and Norwegian music in Poland (at the Warsaw Autumn and Codes festivals in Lublin and Krakow). In 2023, the Foundation co-organized artistic residencies for collaborating musicians at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Royal Conservatoire in Birmingham. These residencies resulted in works written especially for Polish performers by British composers.
• Events organised by the Music Foundation “Harmonies and Noises” were financed from grants from, among others, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, the National Institute of Music and Dance, the Cultural Office of the Capital City of Warsaw, the National Audiovisual Institute, Stoart, the PZU Foundation, ZAiKS and foreign institutions such as the Goethe-Institut, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Hanns Eisler Society, the Mauricio Kagel Foundation, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Embassy of Denmark, the Embassy of Finland, Finnish and Danish music foundations.