Research Library of the Polish Composers' Union
Mieczysław Kominek and Marietta Morawska-Büngeler at a meeting at the headquarters of the Polish Composers’ Union, 27 September 2024; photo: Maciej Borowski
In our virtual reading room, we invite you to explore the work of an exceptional person and a long-standing friend of the Polish Composers’ Union Library. We fondly recall her many visits over the years to our premises in Warsaw’s Old Town Market Square, both for research and in connection with organisational activities. In recent years, our collaboration has led, among other things, to the publication on polmic.pl, freely available in open access, of Marietta Morawska-Büngeler’s remarkable and impressive work Dusza dźwięków (The Soul of Sounds). We have also made a modest but meaningful contribution to organising a competition of the same name for music school students, whose first edition took place in 2025–26. We warmly encourage you to explore these projects. Here, we also draw your attention to her study Na tropach polskiej muzyki współczesnej w Niemczech (2015–2023) (Tracing Polish Contemporary Music in Germany, 2015–2023), which the author has kindly made available to us. It is the result of research undertaken with a grant from the ZAiKS Fund for the Support of Creative Work.
Marietta Morawska-Büngeler holds a doctorate in the humanities, specialising in music theory. She studied music theory and composition at the State Higher School of Music (now the Chopin University of Music) in Warsaw, and musicology, psychology and phonetics at the University of Cologne. For many years, she has worked as a freelance journalist and radio producer, creating her own programmes for various German radio broadcasters. Her programmes explore contemporary music, science and culture, drawing on interviews with people from a wide range of professions and social backgrounds. In 2007, she received the Der Silberne Columbus – Radiopreis (Silver Columbus) journalism award for a programme about Kraków. Since 1998, she has also pursued creative work in music, the visual arts and literature.
From the outset of her professional career, she has promoted Polish and international contemporary music. Commissioned by the Cologne-based broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), she curated an exhibition about the WDR Electronic Music Studio as part of the Nuova Atlantide exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1986. From 1986 to 1992, she served on the board of the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung (Institute for New Music and Music Education) in Darmstadt, becoming its Vice-Chair in 1989. She is the author of Schwingende Elektronen (Vibrating Electrons), a book about the WDR Electronic Music Studio in Cologne (1988), as well as numerous scholarly publications, articles, reviews and interviews on music and sociocultural topics, and encyclopaedia entries.
In 2011, she established the Musica et ars moderna Foundation in Poland, which she headed until 2017. She also undertakes interdisciplinary academic research.
She collaborated with the Department of Musical Acoustics at the Faculty of Sound Engineering of the Chopin University of Music on research into the foundations of musical hearing. She has taught at various educational institutions, including music schools, secondary schools, Georg-August-Universität (the University of Göttingen), the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung (Institute for New Music and Music Education) in Darmstadt, and the Robert Schumann Hochschule (University of Music) in Düsseldorf. From 2007 to 2010, she worked as a freelance trainer and coach in communication and rhetoric for Integrata AG in Düsseldorf. She developed an art therapy programme for people with cancer, as well as personal development programmes for musicians, managers and athletes. She leads seminars at the Dr. Mildred Scheel Akademie, part of Deutsche Krebshilfe (German Cancer Aid).
We warmly invite you to explore her work!
