Wojciech Stępień—a noted composer, music theorist and musicologist who, for the past year, was a visiting Fulbright Scholar at UCLA—recently dropped by the USC Polish Music Center. This wasn’t his first visit with us because, during the past year, Dr. Stępień attended several concerts we produced on the USC campus and at the Holocaust Museum LA.
On this occasion, however, we received several of Wojciech Stępień’s scores, representing a broad sample of works he composed during the past twenty years or so. They include the following:
· biel/whiteness – three songs for soprano, baritone, flute and piano to texts by Jan Twardowski and Józef Baka (2001)
· Sketch About Dmitri – string quartet in one movement (2002)
· Interrupted Sonnet for Bassoon and Piano (2002)
· Captain Who – Shanty Musical for instrumental ensemble, vocal ensemble and dancers (2002)
· Mass “Domus Dei” (“God’s House”) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, mixed choir and orchestra to texts by Paweł Jędrzejko (2003)
· liturgical songs for soprano, oboe and English horn (2004)
· Cello Concerto “For Suffering Angels” (2005)
· Czarne lustro, opera kameralna/misterium | Black Mirror, chamber opera/mystery play (2019)
· Five Letters to the Beautiful Knight, cycle of songs for baritone and viola da gamba to texts by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (2020)
These scores will join the PMC collection of Polish contemporary music collectively known as the New Voices Collection, encompassing works by Wojtek Blecharz, Marcel Chyrzyński, Maciej Jabłoński, Jarosław Kapuściński, Barbara Kaszuba, Mateusz Ryczek, and Ewa Trębacz, among others.
Wojciech Stepień graciously autographed each of the scores (pictured above at the PMC). He also shared with us his latest plans for an opera based on Christopher Isherwood’s celebrated novel, A Single Man. Fascinated by this book since he was seventeen, Dr. Stępień is currently working with the Christopher Isherwood Foundation in Los Angeles and the New York based librettist, Amanda Hollander on this project.