Elżbieta Sikora

Elżbieta Sikora’s music is neither spectral nor serial. Although she explored both techniques during her studies, she never aligned herself with either school. Born in Lwów, Poland, in 1943, Sikora received her earliest musical education not through formal instruction but through exposure to sound and an intensely active habit of listening.

She later attended the Warsaw Academy of Music, where she earned a degree in sound engineering. That training led her to work in this capacity with Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in the 1960s. It was there, alongside Schaeffer and his team, that she made her first attempts at composition and developed the deep fascination with electroacoustic music that would shape her career.

Sikora then returned to Poland to continue her studies, this time focusing on instrumental composition. She worked with Tadeusz Baird² and Zbigniew Rudzinski before settling permanently in Paris in 1981. From that point forward, she composed extensively for both electroacoustic and instrumental ensembles, making it her goal to braid the two sound worlds together in mixed-media and live electronic works.

Sikora’s garden of sounds

Sikora’s artistic practice springs from her musician’s sensibility, a keen ear for sound phenomena, and a life shaped by travel. Wherever she went, she recorded what she heard, at first with a DAT (Digital Audio Tape) recorder. She gathered the sounds of her surroundings — the ocean, city noises, the clatter of glass recycling bins, the murmur of railway stations and other modes of transport — any sound capable of evoking an image, sensation, or memory. She draws on these field recordings as readily as on synthesized sound. For this reason, Christian Zanési describes her as “a sound omnivore³”.

At present her catalogue contains more than 120 works, including twenty-four acousmatic pieces designed to be presented through loudspeakers. Within this electroacoustic output, however, Sikora draws an important distinction between purely electroacoustic compositions and radiophonic works. For her, the radiophonic piece constitutes a genre in its own right, one she cultivated through her work at the RTF (Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française) in Paris and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw.

She considers electroacoustic composition to be studio work, and enjoys being alone with her equipment, where conditions are optimal for listening and concentration. “All studios are the same nowadays,” she notes, “and half a day with a technician is generally all I need to familiarize myself with the tools, as they usually have the software I work with.” Her many residencies have included the GRM and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, as well as Freiburg, Berlin, Bourges, Brussels, and elsewhere, settings that have together given rise to some fifteen pieces.

In Chicago al fresco (2009), one of her greatest electroacoustic works, Sikora mixed and layered recorded sequences in an uninterrupted flow, exploring the emotional impact of raw, in situ sound as it collides with the resonant vibrations of live stringed instruments. “I like using ‘raw’ sound, in which I perceive manipulations and potentialities,” she says. “The material for Axe Rouge V (2012) was taken from a beer can and other everyday objects.”

Sikora’s search for an ambivalent space between the real and the dreamlike, the trivial and the poetic, is at work in Paris, Gare du Nord (2017). She used sounds recorded in the underground metro station (not the railway station at street level) and reworked them in the studio to draw out formal linkages. Out of these materials she extracts structural signals and rhythmic patterns, such as the cadence of the metro cars moving along the tracks.

In Grain de sable (2002), she employs the mighty sound of a recycling truck dumping a load of glass. She filters, stretches, slows, and magnifies this noisy material until it permeates the entire piece. Interwoven with workers’ voices and the sounds of an imagined world, it transforms an ordinary urban event into something charged with poetry. Rouge d'été (2002) is another high-tension masterpiece, where rhythmic pulses and found sounds combine to create a space where the symphonic and the tribal coexist.

Her radiophonic works (Hörspiel, in German), although they are also acousmatic, belong to a distinct genre, one exemplified by Luc Ferrari’s Far West News. These pieces, made to be listened to in more intimate and even domestic settings, place emphasis on the voice, spoken or sung. There may or may not be a story; often only a loose narrative thread guides the listener. Within this genre, Sikora finds freedom to fully unleash her imaginative energy. Géométries variables (1991), for example, which was commissioned by the GRM, has an almost Dadaist bent and more than a touch of humor. It features messages Sikora selected from her answering machine and then looped on tape in a rondo-like form. The voices are woven into a chatty flow with fragments of her own work in a way that causes the strange to vie with the unexpected, building a kind of sonic self-portrait of the composer.

Eine Rose als Stütze (2002), a commission from the Heidelberg Festival, sets three German poems within a richly layered radiophonic design. Events and temporal planes overlap, yielding priority not to the polished final artwork but to documentary immediacy. She weaves together a lively and emotional polytextual tapestry from testimonies and a wide range of vocal materials: spoken words, including her father’s voice, as well as sung passages from Lied rehearsals.

Commissioned by Polish Radio and the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Norwid’Ellipse⁴ (2021) pays tribute to Cyprian Norwid, the Polish “prophet bard” exiled in Paris following the 1830 Revolution. The work combines three actors’ voices with electroacoustic sound, alongside prerecorded and processed accordion and double bass. In search of just the right vocal texture, Sikora asked a rapper to read one of Norwid’s poems.

In her two operas for radio, Sikora returns to literary considerations, while continuing to explore the equal expressive force of sung and spoken voice. Derrière son double (1983), commissioned by France Culture’s Atelier de création radiophonique⁵ and GRM, is a thirty-minute piece with libretto and score. Using a surrealist text by Jean-Pierre Duprey⁶, the work brings together two singers (soprano and baritone), four voice actors (including a narrator to compensate for the absence of staging), six instrumentalists (flutist, percussionist, and string quartet), and electronics. Sikora disrupts the linear narrative flow, interweaving and superimposing the voices, which at times emerge as whispered filigree over the singing.

L'Arrache-Cœur (1986), another commission by the Atelier de création radiophonique, carries the radiophonic ambition further. Using a libretto Sikora adapted from Boris Vian’s novel, she expands the number of performers to include five singers, three children’s voices, a four-part choir, and a small instrumental ensemble — though notably no electronics. At the same time, she extends the work’s scale from forty-five minutes to an hour and ten minutes, auguring the large-scale operatic undertaking in 1992 of Madame Curie (completed in 2011), where electronics return as an integral element.

Mixing sources: from mixed compositions to live electronics

Historically, “mixed” music is a term used to describe pieces that include an instrumental component, performed by live musicians, and a recorded component. “I was a bit tired of my solitary work in the studio, and I wanted to introduce instruments into my compositions,” Sikora recalls. In the 1980s, she began dividing her work time between recorded compositions, mixed works, and instrumental music, an unusual choice in an era in which composers were pressured to “pick sides” between Schaeffer and Boulez. After an experimental run with Voyage n° 1 for tape and tuba or double bass, La Tête d'Orphée II (1982) was Sikora’s first major mixed composition. Commissioned by IRCAM, it was debuted by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, performed by flutist Pierre-Yves Artaud. The piece, which is around twenty minutes long, immediately highlights the relationship between the flute and the fixed media. Without seeking the kind of real-time interaction between the two sound sources explored by Ivo Malec⁷, Sikora set up a sort of complementarity between them, in which neither one dominates the other. At times they oppose each other — for instance, in the brutal clashes emanating from the loudspeakers as the piece opens — while at others they approach each other in register, tempo, or dynamic, even displaying a kind of collaboration. The electroacoustic part is occasionally heard on its own, for example, anticipating the dynamic of heightening tension in the final quarter of the work. The four-track tape recording made for this piece has been digitized and preserved by IRCAM, which will continue to update it as technologies evolve⁸.

Like Chicago, where Sikora had earlier set up her recording equipment, Lisbon is a city that “sounds” — in the hubbub of its cafés, the echoes of its cobbled streets, and the vertiginous routes of its tramways. In Lisboa, tramway 28 (1999), a tribute to Fernando Pessŏa, Sikora brings together the city’s sounds, recorded, mixed, and edited in the studio, combined with the soprano and alto saxophones of Daniel Kientzy, whose work with this instrument Sikora has used on several occasions. While the two sound sources do not ignore each other, they exist as autonomous, complementary presences. The work’s picturesque elements (trolley bells, the murmur of voices, the screech of trams on the rails) emerge through the tape recording, while a more poetic, vagabond sense of wandering is expressed by the melodic meanderings of the saxophone. Sikora wrote much of the piece unmetered (as Louis Couperin did his Préludes), giving the performer flexibility in phrasing.

The first three numbers of the cycle Axe rouge (2004, 2007, and 2008) were also composed for Kientzy on saxophone. In these mixed pieces, the saxophone is solo (Axe rouge III) or accompanied by double bass (Axe Rouge I) or by percussion (Axe Rouge II).

Sikora writes for her own instrument, the piano, only sparingly. Instead, she favors strings, where she can control gesture and model the sound as she wishes. Her catalogue includes three string quartets, a string quintet with clarinet (Sonosphère II. My'Kaddisch, 2015), a String sextet, homage to Witold Lutosławski (1993), and a Concerto pour violon et orchestre (2018). Her Solo for violin (1983), the only noncommissioned piece in her catalogue, is emblematic of her approach. A sustained wave, generated by fast trills, is propelled forward by an expressive gesture that projects through space, conveyed through the sound’s energy, the natural dramaturgy of its behavior (impulse, expressive silence, suspense, and so on) and the line’s poetics and registers. Twenty-six years later, Sikora wrote Soleos (2019) for violin and fixed media, a commission for the Leopold Mozart International Violin Competition in Augsburg, to provide young participants the opportunity to experience the performance conditions of mixed composition. An organic quality is preserved in the electronics, which include violin sounds; these act as a backdrop for the instrumentals. Sikora dislikes denaturing the sounds of instruments, but she does make use of extended techniques (portamento, gettato, ponticello, harmonics) which correspond, in studio terms, to granulation, filtering, smoothing, and distortion. These different states are explored by both sound sources in this piece that requires virtuosic technique.

Suite II for harpsichord, fixed media, and live electronics was composed for Sikora’s compatriot Élisabeth Chojnacka, who premiered it in 1992. Sikora was assisted by Daniel Teruggi⁹, who used SYTER, a real-time audio digital processor developed by GRM. The piece has four movements like a symphony, with the harpsichord (Allegro ma non troppo) standing in tension against the recorded sounds. Sikora had also worked with SYTER in its early days in the 1980s, in Rappel II, commissioned by GRM and Radio France.

For much of her career, Sikora preferred composing solo in the studio and thus had little experience collaborating with a computer music designer¹⁰ for new digital tools, which she admits had always intimidated her. This was to change in 2017, some thirty-five years after writing Suite II, when IRCAM and the Polish Ministry of Culture commissioned a work for Wrocław’s new National Forum of Music, on the occasion of the Musica Electronica Nova Festival, which Sikora directed at that time¹¹. Continuing her practice of developing works in numbered cycles, Sonosphère III and IV (which headlined the ManiFeste festival in 2024) are for orchestra and electronics that require designer Sebastien Naves at the controls. Sonosphère III fuses the colors of the orchestra with live electronics in long, surging textures marked by strange, shimmering iridescence. By the end of Sonosphère IV, through the magic of electronics, brilliant synthesized sounds have altered the listener’s perception of time. The work is intended to have no beginning: the orchestra is already playing as the audience enters the hall. It ends by “coasting” to a close¹² in a wide and churning wake of hectic, brilliant sound.

The porosity of practice

The cycle of five Sonosphères (2013-2019) begins with Twilling for solo oboe, ensemble, and electronics. The instrumental ensemble includes a Karlax, a digital interface instrument shaped like a stylized clarinet¹³, with which the sounds of the oboe solo can be finely controlled live onstage, using gestures.

The cycle ends with Sonosphère V. Wanda Landowska for orchestra and electric guitar. “I chose the electric guitar instead of the harpsichord,” Sikora explains in her notes on the composition, “because I wanted to set my score in the landscape of the twenty-first century. This choice also showcases Wanda Landowska’s modernity. She was a Polish-born harpsichordist (1879-1959), who, if she were still with us, would probably have played this instrument.”

While Sikora tends to group her work into families — Axe rouge, Sonosphère, Suite, Rappel — there is no organic link among the pieces in format or material other than a common spirit: the Baroque era for Suite, the configuration of spaces for Sonosphère, and a somewhat personal mental image in Axe rouge.

In Sonosphère V, the guitar emerges amid a succession of timbres and robust percussion, tracing out a drama and playing with space. From the groovy to the virtuosic, with dizzying slides, impact noises, and saturation, the electric guitar provides Sikora with an ideal interface between the electronic and instrumental worlds. The composition pulls the soloist bodily into its cadence, even as an impulse of improvisation throbs through it, evoking Jimmy Hendrix.

While electronics have remained an integral compositional tool in some of Sikora’s projects (notably the Sonosphères adventure, as well as her opera Madame Curie), she prefers investing fully in a written score, fulfilling a desire for orchestral plenitude and virtuosic playing. She is aware of this “Dionysian tendency” that threads through her six concertos. “Studio sounds, not only their waveforms but what they become (attack, form, cutoff frequency, etc.) have influenced the way I write for instruments, not to mention the transfer from one world to another; electroacoustics have forged the way I listen.”

In her written scores, she also recognizes the incandescent influence of her Polish role models: Witold Lutosławski, whom she reveres, as well as Krzysztof Penderecki and Kazimierz Serocki. From Lutosławski, she learned audacity in form and dense, polyphonic string writing. Penderecki passed on to her a driving tension in musical discourse, while Serocki represents experimentation.

Energy drives Sikora’s Concerto pour piano et orchestre, hommge to Frédéric Chopin (2000), a commission from the Société Chopin in Paris. The opening “ignition” and the piano’s insistent trill establish tension, giving the first movement its urgent momentum. That sense of propulsion is maintained throughout: trills, tremolos, and orchestral rolls continually sustain the sound, while strong polarities (shaped by the enduring influence of Béla Bartók) anchor the discourse harmonically.

“At the beginning of the work, I fill up tons of paper, fragments, sequences, chords, slivers of motifs, in a cheerful mess, before organizing everything,” she confides. “I try to let myself be guided by inner longing, then later I shape it more carefully, depending on my experience and on the plans I have somewhere in my head.”

South Shore (2007-2008), her concerto for amplified harp, live transformations, and orchestra, is the only piece in which she uses live electronics to support certain types of play (glissandos, cluster effects), fostering an alchemy between the soloist and the orchestra.

In her first Organ Concerto, written in 2007 and revised in 2020, Sikora extends the same approach she had explored in her Piano Concerto: she fuses the sounds of the solo instrument with those of the orchestra to create a meta-instrument more powerful than the sum of its parts. The result is a feast of timbres expressed in muscular, forceful writing. At the central cadence, she sculpts sound and molds musical morphologies much as she does in her studio compositions.

In the Violin Concerto (2018), which precedes her second Organ Concerto (2022) by four years, the orchestra bolsters and amplifies the soloist, reaching dizzying heights of tension and pushing to the extremes of its high register. “In all of my music, I seek intensity,” Sikora declared, noting that commission deadlines have often created pressures that flavor her work with urgency.

Opera and dramaturgy

Little would hint at the depths of Sikora’s affection for vocal performance — indeed, she hated opera, until the graduation requirements of her composition studies under Rudziński forced her to write one. Ariadna (1977), the chamber opera she composed based on a text by Cesare Pavese (translated into Polish by Stanisław Kasprzysiak), was her entry into the form and sparked a passion for both dramatic projects and vocal writing. Ariadna stages words as much as it does sounds; its two voices (soprano and mezzo-soprano) use a syllabic spoken and sung style that is both delicate and natural. The frugally chosen instrumental ensemble (piano, celesta, trombones, percussion, etc.), in contrast, resourcefully marshals both power and expressive effect. The masterfully written work received second prize at the 1978 Carl Maria von Weber Composers’ Competition in Dresden. A year later, it was performed on the stage of the Warsaw Chamber Opera; a recording was produced at the same time.

After a second experience with stage performance with L’Arrache-cœur in 1992, in 2008 Sikora decided to realize a major project, her hallmark piece. The opera Madame Curie (2010-2012) is a French–Polish commission to honor the hundredth anniversary of Marie Skłodowska-Curie’s receiving the Nobel Prize. The world premiere of this large-scale work (1 hour 20 minutes) was in November 2011 at the UNESCO Headquarters auditorium, followed a few days later by a run at the Baltic Opera in Gdańsk. The three-act libretto, by Agata Miklaszewska, tells the story of a morally upright and obstinately free young Polish woman arriving in Paris at the age of twenty-four — a life story and a personality that seem surprisingly similar to those of Sikora herself. Sikora chooses broadly deployed lyricism to reflect the brilliant intensity of radium, exploiting instrumental timbres to great effect (including electric guitar and accordion) and heightening them with a rich percussion section. She worked with GRM’s Diego Losa to create the electronics, which appear at irregular intervals to set the sonic scene or to carry the orchestra beyond its instrumental role, notably with the sounds of bombardments.

Relationship with the world

Janek Wiśniewski, Décembre, Pologne is an acousmatic drama with no vocals, a commission from GRM in 1982, the same year IRCAM commissioned Sikora’s La Tête d'Orphée II. Janek Wiśniewski closes her “Trois têtes” (“Three Heads”) cycle. Updating the Orphic myth, the third head is that of a Polish worker shot dead by the police during a shipyard demonstration in 1970. Of extraordinary violence, this is the composer’s “punch-to-the-gut” work — powerful, defiant, with biting blows like those of the mythical Cerberus, whose image is evoked by the figure of Orpheus. Tightly edited, the work’s anger is expressed through incisive sounds and dense and mobile polyphony.

Similar emotion flows from the 1979 electroacoustic piece Rapsodie pour la mort d’une République, which deals with uprisings in South America. For this score, Sikora revealed that she used recordings of an atomic bomb.

More recently, Underground Passage (2019), for orchestra and fixed media, was commissioned by Polish Radio to commemorate the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1944. In the high-tension first movement, Sikora contrasts the two forces boldly and deftly, pulling the sound toward a noisy and sometimes saturated universe, within a space shaped by the resonant acoustics of underground passages. Sonic exploration and the workings of the imagination combine in a single creative gesture. This “sonic whole” François Bayle described as “anything the ear can hear and be moved by¹⁴”.

After two orchestral pieces, Liquid Air (2021) and Overture (2023), Tenebrae (2023) is Sikora’s latest composition; she is also working on a new opera. Tenebræ, for soloist, choir, and orchestra, was commissioned by the Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto, and premiered at the Warsaw National Opera on 19 April 2023, eighty years to the day after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which the piece commemorates. (This was not the first time Sikora’s work has addressed the Holocaust; it is also the theme of The Sixth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Kill, written shortly before.) Pierced with the dramatic force that inhabits Sikora’s personality, the composition, recalling a Passion, is “grave” in the Baroque sense, combining solemnity and fervor. Two poems by Paul Ceylan, including Stehen (“Standing”), are sung in German, while Polish texts drawn from testimonies of victims and survivors of the Nazi concentration camp in Majdanek are chanted loudly by the choir. As in Madame Curie, the sound’s forceful flow, along with the intensity of the singing, acts as an antidote to pathos. Sikora does not, however, banish emotion; it is brought gently to the surface in a clarinet solo that evokes the melody of the Kaddish prayer.

Sikora’s diverse and versatile work leaves almost no genres or practice untouched. Whether exploring “the art of fixed media” and the magic of the studio or the resources of instrumental writing and text, she maintains the same eagerness to embrace the full range of possibilities in sound perception and expression. “First I find, then I seek,” as Schaeffer so aptly said. The sound Sikora pursues lies beyond mere experimentation: “I want it to go somewhere, to carry something; that’s how it will define me.”

Such music, expressed in the authority of a gesture, in a sense of color, in the world of the human voice, and in the mixing of sources, Sikora now recognizes in her compatriot, the composer and vocalist Agata Zubel (born in 1979): “When I heard Agata’s Cadenza for violin for the first time (a title I used myself in 2012 for my cello solo), I thought for a moment it was my own Solo for violin,” Sikora recalls. What better way to argue for the link between the two composers?

<sup>1. Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are taken from the author’s interview with Sikora.↩
2. Trained in the tradition of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, Tadeusz Baird went on to help found the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1954.↩
3. A member of GRM, he served as its artistic director until 2015.↩
4. Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821-1883) was a Polish poet, author, playwright, thinker, painter, and sculptor. Norwid'Ellipse headlined at the Longueur d’ondes: Festival de la radio et de l'écoute, in Brest in February 2024.↩
5. The Atelier de création radiophonique was founded in 1969 by Alain Trutat.↩
6. Jean-Pierre Duprey (1930-1959) was a poet associated with André Breton and the Surrealist movement. He died by suicide at the age of 29.↩
7. Ivo Malec (1925-2019) was a pioneer and leading light in mixed composition, the author of works such as Cantate pour elle, Attacca, and Lumina.↩
8. This process of migration to other technologies is also known as “porting.”↩
9. Daniel Teruggi (born in 1952) succeeded François Bayle as the director of GRM in 1997 and took over as Director of Research and Experimentation at France’s National Audiovisual Institute (INA) in 2001.↩
10. In French, a “RIM,” for réalisateur en informatique musical: the contemporary successor to the “music assistant” in electroacoustic studios.↩
11. Sikora was director of the Wroclaw Musica Electronica Nova Festival from 2009 to 2017.↩
12. The French here is “sur l’erre,” one of the fifteen Temporal Semiotic Units (Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles) developed by the laboratory Musique et Informatique de Marseille. It is best understood as “controlled coasting” or “coasting to a stop.” The term uses the nautical imagery of a boat that, having furled its sails or stopped its motor, continues to glide forward on its remaining momentum. It therefore suggests a gradual movement toward stillness produced by inertia rather than by active expenditure of braking energy.↩
13. The Karlax was invented by Rémi Dury, who wanted to reintroduce instrumental gesture into computer performances.↩
14. François Bayle in Quarante ans de création musicale, Éditions MF, 2017, p. 103.↩</sup>