The influence of polish compositional work of 20th and 21st century on the development of harpsichord technique

The article gives a review of the Polish contemporary music for harpsichord and discusses its impact on the development of harpsichord technique. The author’s main objective was to present analyses of the most important phenomena in the context of performance‑ related issues, such as the use of a graphic score, aleatoric elements, sonorism, music performativity, or an electronic layer in the pieces dedicated to the instrument commonly associated with early music performance. The presentation of first experimental works of Roman Haubenstock‑Ramati and Bogusław Schaeffer is followed by a discussion on other pieces written by Polish composers, such as Zygmunt Krauze, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Jerzy Bauer, Andrzej Kwieciński, Paweł Mykietyn or Artur Zagajewski. Not only are works for harpsichord solo analysed, but also orchestral pieces with harpsichord in solo part, and chamber ones. The author raises the question of the role of those works for Polish music and emphasizes an increasingly growing interest in harpsichord, observable in the compositional output of young Polish composers in particular.