In January 2025, the USC Polish Music Center entered its fortieth year of operations on the USC campus in Los Angeles. What began as the Polish Music Reference Center in one small basement room of USC’s Doheny Library in 1985 has since become an institution with worldwide reach—as a library and research center possessing world class collections of manuscripts and museum quality objects, as an online publisher of articles and information about Polish culture not available in English elsewhere, as well as an organizer of conferences, concerts and festivals in California and beyond.
Founded by Wanda Wilk—a USC Thornton School of Music alumna with a vision of creating a reference library and a promotion hub for Polish music, especially Poland’s contemporary composers—and her husband, Dr. Stefan Wilk, after the first decade of operations, the Center moved to a larger space at the United University Church. At about that same time, the PMC reins were passed on to Dr. Maja Trochimczyk, who continued expanding the Center’s Manuscript Collection and founded the annual Paderewski Lecture-Recital series that became the PMC’s flagship event on the USC campus each fall.
In 2004, the PMC headquarters were moved into a still larger suite of offices in Stonier Hall, just before several extraordinary collections were donated to the Center. The most important and the largest included the Zygmunt & Luisa Stojowski Collection, the Henryk Wars/Henry Vars Collection, the Bronisław Kaper Collection, the Paderewski Archive—Paso Robles Collection, and the Roman Ryterband Collection. Smaller collections, including those of Ludomir Różycki and Józef Reiss, as well as additions of manuscripts and other memorabilia has further expanded PMC’s Manuscript Collection holdings especially those of Joanna Bruzdowicz, Marta Ptaszyńska and Krzysztof Meyer.
The current PMC team of Director Marek Zebrowski and Assistant Director Krysta Close, in charge since 2004, was augmented over a year ago by Archive Specialist Tomasz Fechner, whose new and permanent position was made possible thanks to a generous 2019 grant from the Taube Foundation for archiving and digitizing our unique collections. Since 2013, we collaborate with Poland’s National Archives on an annual professional exchange that brings world renowned scholars to the PMC to assist in cataloging and preserving our invaluable collections.
As an institution dedicated to promoting Polish music worldwide, we are proud to look back at the legacy of countless concerts organized by the Center in Southern California, elsewhere in the U.S. and in various European countries, including of course Poland. We are also proud of our continued involvement in organizing the annual Paderewski Festival and Youth Piano Competition in Paso Robles, where we present world-class artists in concert alongside young talent from four Central California counties. Thanks to our connections with such august institutions as the Kraków Music Academy, Paderewski Institute of Musicology at the Jagiellonian University, Małopolska Talent Academy, National Museum and Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland’s Society of Chamber Musicians, Polish Composers’ Union, Polish Music Publishers, Paderewski International Piano Competition, as well as such governmental institutions as the National Archives, Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Poland’s diplomatic representatives in the U.S., we are able to reach a global audience of Polish music fans. This outreach is augmented further by the PMC website with its Newsletter that since 1995 had provided online information about Polish composers, Polish music, concerts, festivals and other related news items.
For performances of Polish music, we draw upon the Thornton School of Music students and local freelancers, we invite and present on stage Polish artists travelling in the United States, we bring young Polish pianists under the International Cultural Exchange Program administered by us and the Paderewski Festival in Paso Robles, and much, much more, including concerts at USC by such immortals as Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Witold Lutosławski, Marta Ptaszyńska, and Stanisław Skrowaczewski. Our local partners include the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles, POLAM Federal Credit Union, Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, Polish Center in LA, Modjeska Art and Culture Club and a dedicated group of individual supporters who donate to help underwrite the expenses connected to our operations.
After forty years, it can be said that as an institution we’ve reached the maturity of middle age. Yet we still feel young, eager to spread our wings and open new musical horizons for the next generations of students, researchers and general public interested in our mission. It continues because there is still much to do—new concerts and festivals to organize, ongoing collections to attract, archive and digitize, and ever-expanding knowledge to make available online—and, thanks to the constant growth of new music and generations of talented musicians and scholars, we are excited for the possibilities of the next 40 years, and beyond.
