Marta Ptaszyńska,
composer, percussionist and teacher; born on 29th July 1943 in Warsaw. She studied composition with Tadeusz Paciorkiewicz and music theory at the State Higher School of Music in Warsaw as well as percussion performance with Jerzy Zgodzinski at the State Higher School of Music in Poznań. She also worked privately with Witold Lutosławski, who later became her mentor. As a French Government grant recipient, in 1969-70 she continued her compositional studies with Nadia Boulanger and attended Olivier Messiaen’s analysis classes at the Paris Conservatory and at the Centre Bourdan de L’ORTF. In 1974 she received an Artist Diploma in Percussion Performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she worked with Cloyd Duff, Richard Weiner, and Donald Erb.
Marta Ptaszyńska won prizes at numerous composition competitions, including the Youth Competition of the Polish Composers' Union (1971), the Polish Radio & Television Composers' Competition (1972), competitions of the Percussive Arts Society in the US (1974 and 1976). In 1986 her work La Novella d’Inverno for strings (1984) won the 1st Prize at the International Rostrum of Composers at UNESCO in Paris and her Concerto for Marimba and Orchestra (1985) received an award at the International Composers Competition in New York. She has also received several ASCAP Awards.
Ptaszyńska has received commissions from orchestras including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, Polish Chamber Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, and the Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra and from artists such as contralto Ewa Podleś, marimba virtuoso Keiko Abe, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, and harpist Alice Chalifoux. She has also received commissions from the Fryderyk Chopin National Institute in Warsaw, Poland, the Kościuszko Foundation in New York, the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden, Germany, the Caramoor International Music Festival, the International Harp Festival, and the Rockefeller Chapel in Chicago. She was commissioned by the Warsaw National Opera to write two operas for children (Mister Marimba and Magic Doremik) and by the Grand Opera Theatre in Łódź to write the opera The Lovers of the Valldemosa Cloister for Chopin’s Bicentennial. Her television opera Oscar of Alva, produced by the Kraków Television, received both audience and critical acclaim at the International Festival of Television Operas in Salzburg in 1989. Her opera for children, Mister Marimba, which was in the repertory of the National Opera in Warsaw from 1998 until 2006, has enjoyed phenomenal success and popularity for eight consecutive seasons with 114 performances. Her Holocaust Memorial Cantata gained international recognition when performed several times in 1993 under the baton of Lord Yehudi Menuhin.
Her music has been performed at prestigious international festivals, including ISCM World Music Days, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Salzburg Festival, the Warsaw Autumn International Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Gulbenkian Foundation New Music Festival, Prix Futura in Berlin, Caramoor International Music Festival, among many others. Widely acclaimed as a virtuoso percussionist, she performed extensively as a soloist percussionist for several decades and has participated in many European and American festivals.
Her works are published by PWM Edition (Polish Music Publishing House) in Poland and by Theodore Presser in the U.S. Her works are recorded on many various labels around the world (CD Accord-Universal, Muza Polish Records, Olympia, Chandos, Dux, ProViva, and Bayers Records). In 2002 PWM Edition released a book about her music entitled Music – The Most Perfect Language, Conversations with Marta Ptaszyńska.
Her distinguished career as a composition teacher includes professorships at Bennington College in Vermont, the University of California in Berkeley and in Santa Barbara, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Indiana University in Bloomington, and Northwestern University in Evanston. In 1998 Ptaszyńska was appointed a Professor of Music and in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Since 2005 she holds an endowed chair of Helen B. & Frank L. Sulzberger Professor of Composition.
In 1965-70 Ptaszyńska was a president of the Youth Circle of the Polish Composers' Union. In the years 1981-84 she aso served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Percussive Arts Society (PAS) in the U.S. In 1991 she co-founded and was vice president of the American Society of Polish Music in New York for several years. As an artistic adviser, she arranged the music programme of two Polish music festivals which took place at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York in 1994 and 1996.
She has received many awards and decoration, including the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1995), the award of the Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation (1997), the Benjamin H. Danks Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006), the Fromm Music Foundation Award from Harvard University (2006), the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award (2010), the annual award of the Polish Composers' Union (for outstanding work as a composer and promotion of Polish musical culture in the world, 2011), the Silver Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis awarded by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland (2013), the Polish Heritage Award of the Polish American Congress (2017), and the American Council for Polish Culture Award (2019), Commandery of the Order of Merit of the People's Republic of Poland (2022).
updated: 2008, 2020 (ac), 2022 (wa)
Composer's website: www.martaptaszynska.com
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