Honoring Jan Krzywicki as Composer, Conductor, and Teacher

Thirty Years of Contributions to the Community

This article originally appeared in a somewhat different form in Broad Street Review and is reprinted with permission.

In February 2022, Network for New Music honored Jan Krzywicki, its Ensemble conductor for more than 30 years, for his many contributions to the new music community. A concert featuring two of Krzywicki’s own compositions, a major new commission from the awarding-winning composer Sebastian Currier, a commission from Philadelphia-area composer Michael Shingo Crawford were on the program.

Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

To honor Jan Krzywicki’s more than thirty years as Network for New Music’s conductor, the new music commissioning and performing group celebrated his many musical contributions—as conductor, composer, and teacher at its February 2022. As Linda Reichert, Network’s co-founder and artistic director emerita put it, “Network would not be here as it is today without Jan.”

Krzywicki, a native Philadelphian, began his early composition studies with Joseph Castaldo. Later, his teachers included Vincent Persichetti and Elliott Carter, as well as Nadia Boulanger and Darius Milhaud. He has been on the faculty of Temple University since 1987, teaching composition and directing the New Music Ensemble.

A Rare Composer-Conductor

In 1990, he joined Network for New Music as the group’s first conductor, thus expanding the group’s options in programming larger, complex ensemble works. Network’s current artistic director, Thomas Schuttenhelm, explains that Krzywicki is among the few contemporary “composer-conductors” who “bring creating music (composition) and re-creating it in performance into a unified whole.” With Network alone Krzywicki has conducted 114 works, and more than half of those were first performances of Network commissions.

Krzywicki conducting a 1995 Network for New Music performance of Robert Capanna's The Man with the Blue Guitar with soprano Jody Kidwell at the University of the Arts. Photo by Don Springer.

Network’s concert featured two of Krzywicki’s own compositions. A new commission, Arabesques de Prés et de Loin II (“Arabesques Near and Far”) for flute, viola, and harp, was, Krzywicki explained, “conceived as a tribute to Claude Debussy in which I sought to enter into his compositional world without seeming like an imposter.”

The other Krzywicki work, Catching Light, is a sextet commissioned and premiered by Network for its thirtieth season in 2015. Each of the three movements (“Flickering,” “Shimmering,” and “Burning”) translates the visual (and even tactile) experience of light and flame into sound. This is a richly imagined work, with intricately textured musical lines, kinetic coloristic effects, and insistent, intensifying baroque-like rhythmic patterns.

Krzywicki as Teacher

Krzywicki—always a champion of local composers—wanted to include one of his own students on the concert program. Thus, Network commissioned Michael Shingo Crawford, a Philadelphia-based composer and former Krzywicki student, resulting in a piano trio, Rainbow Chaser.

A Major New Commission from Sebastian Currier

Network turned to the award-winning composer Sebastian Currier for the major work on this program. Krzywicki admires Currier’s music, saying of him that

“over the years I have conducted and programmed several of Currier's works, every one of which I wish I had written myself.”

This commission, Waves, for soprano, nine players, electronic media, and video is roughly thirty minutes in length—an ambitious undertaking even without a pandemic. In it, Currier has set texts from Virginia Woolf’s late novel, The Waves, presenting the thoughts of various women and girls, from a young child to an eighty-year-old woman.

Network for New Music presented “Intersections” honoring Jan Krzywicki - Sunday, February 27, 2022, at 3pm, Settlement Music School, 416 Queen Street, Philadelphia. The program was repeated on Monday, February 28, 2022, at 7:30pm at Roberts Hall, Haverford College.