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World Premiere of Marta Ptaszyńska’s Crystallites Polyphony in Chicago

May. 31, 2024

Marta Ptaszyńska’s latest work, Crystallites Polyphony for string quartet and marimba, was premiered on May 31 at the Polish Consulate of Chicago by marimba soloist, Josh Graham and the Chen String Quartet. Their performance will be broadcast by Chicago’s WFMT radio on June 10.

Marta Ptaszyńska is a composer, percussionist, and a pedagogue, born in Warsaw, Poland. She has been honored with a number of prizes and awards including the Simon J. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Danks Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation Award, the Award at the International Rostrum of Composers at the UNESCO in Paris, several ASCAP Awards, and many more. In 1995 she received the “Officer Cross of Merit” of the Republic of Poland. 

Ptaszyńska's music has been performed at many 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, the Prix Futura in Berlin, and many others. Ptaszyńska studied composition with Tadeusz Paciorkiewicz at the Academy of Music in Warsaw and worked also privately with Witold Lutosławski, who later became her mentor. As a French Government ‘s grant recipient, she studied in the early seventies with Nadia Boulanger and attended Olivier Messiaen’s analysis classes at the Paris Conservatory. 

Widely acclaimed as a virtuoso percussionist, for several decades Marta Ptaszyńska has performed extensively as a soloist percussionist and participated in many European and American festivals. Her career as a professor of composition includes faculty appointments at Bennington College in Vermont, the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, and Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. 

In 1998 she was appointed a Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Marta Ptaszyńska is published by PWM Edition.

Listen to Marta Ptaszyńska's Scherzo:

Angela Wai Nok Hui performs Scherzo by Marta Ptaszyńska for the BBC Young Musician 2010 Percussion Category Final

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