Life

Zofia Lissa was born in Lviv

Lviv

Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...

 and studied piano and music theory at the Polish Music Society in Lviv. She continued her studies in musicology with Adolf Chybiński at Jan Kazimierz University in Lvov (1924–1929), where she also studied philosophy with Kazimierz Twardowski

Kazimierz Twardowski

Kazimierz Jerzy Skrzypna-Twardowski was a Polish philosopher and logician.-Life:Twardowski's family belonged to the Ogończyk coat-of-arms.Twardowski studied philosophy in Vienna with Franz Brentano and Robert Zimmermann...

 and Roman Ingarden

Roman Ingarden

Roman Witold Ingarden was a Polish philosopher who worked in phenomenology, ontology and aesthetics.Before World War II, Ingarden published his works mainly in the German language...

 and attended lectures on psychology and art history. In 1929 she received a Ph.D., writing her dissertation on Harmonies of Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Frédéric Chopin. Quite independent of the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed an increasingly atonal musical system,...

. After completing her studies, she taught music theory at the Lviv Conservatory, Karol Szymanowski

Karol Szymanowski

Karol Maciej Szymanowski was a Polish composer and pianist.-Life:Szymanowski was born into a wealthy land-owning Polish gentry family in Tymoszówka, then in the Russian Empire, now in Cherkasy Oblast, Ukraine. He studied music privately with his father before going to Gustav Neuhaus'...

's music school and the Frederic Chopin

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

 music school in Lviv, and also conducted research on the musicality of children and adolescents at the Institute of Psychology in Lviv. She wrote the first Polish work on film music Music and Video in 1937.

After the outbreak of World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, she worked in Radio Lviv, and in 1940 served as dean of the faculty in music theory at the Lviv Conservatory. In 1941, after the Nazi attack on the Lwow, she relocated to Namangan

Namangan

Namangan is the third-largest city in Uzbekistan . It is the capital of Namangan Province, in the northern edge of Fergana Valley of north-eastern Uzbekistan.-Geography:...

, Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....

, where she worked as a music teacher. In 1943 she was one of the first to join the Union of Polish Patriots. While in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, she organized radio concerts, wrote reviews of Polish music concerts and published song books and sheet music including Songbook of Polish Children in the USSR (1944), a Polish Soldier Songbook (1944) and Songs and Games for the Polish Kindergarten in the USSR (1945). After the war she remained in Moscow, where she was offered the position of cultural attaché at the Polish embassy.

In 1947 Lissa returned to Warsaw

Warsaw

Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...

 and took a position as deputy director of the Department of Music at the Ministry of Culture and the Arts, where she addressed research activities and music culture. In 1947, she received an appointment at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan

Poznan

Poznań is a city on the Warta river in west-central Poland, with a population of 556,022 in June 2009. It is among the oldest cities in Poland, and was one of the most important centres in the early Polish state, whose first rulers were buried at Poznań's cathedral. It is sometimes claimed to be...

. In 1948 she organized the Department of Musicology at the University of Warsaw

University of Warsaw

The University of Warsaw is the largest university in Poland and one of the most prestigious, ranked as best Polish university in 2010 and 2011...

 and from 1958-75 served as its director. In 1951 she received the title of associate professor and in 1957 full professor at the university. Under her leadership the Institute was active in sponsoring meetings and conferences, including a Prokofiewowska Session (1959), the first international congress on Chopin (1960) and a session dedicated to the work of Karol Szymanowski (1962).

Lissa initiated the organization of the Musica Antiqua Europae Orientalis Festival in Bydgoszcz (1963) and the accompanying international musicological congress, which she chaired. In 1966 with Jerome Feicht, she organized a documentation center and initiated an inventory of early Polish music which resulted in the issue of the series Antiquitates Musicae in Polonia. During her studies, she became involved with left-wing circles and actively participated in the ideological debate on the aesthetics and methodology of Marxist approaches to musicology.

She was a board member (1947–1948) and Vice President (1949–1954) of the Polish Composers' Union, and through her initiative, the Polish Composers' Union admitted musicologists. She was a member of the presidium of the International Musicological Society (1965–1977) and in 1955 was a corresponding member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in 1963 the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Leipzig, and in 1972 the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz.

Her research interests include the history and music theory, history and aesthetics of music, the methodology of history and music theory and history of contemporary Polish music. Her works are in large part testimony to the era in which they were generated, and controversial because methodological approach was based on Marxist ideology. Zofia Lissa introduced a new approach into Polish musicological literature, considering musical styles in their mutual relationships and emphasizing the social functions of music. A bibliography of her work includes nearly 600 items, including several books, dozens of monographs and hundreds of articles, many of which have been translated into foreign languages. She died in Warsaw.

Honors and awards

For her work, Lissa was honored with the Award of the Polish Composers Union (1950), the Second Degree State Prize (1953), Prize from the Committee for Radio and Television (1966), Silver Medal at the Venice Biennale (1969), Award of the Ministry of Higher Education (1965 and 1977), Grade II (1971 and 1976) and the International Music Council Award (1979).

Publications

Lissa was highly prolific, publishing articles, monographs and texts including:

• An outline of the science of music: the National Department, National Institute, Lviv 1934
• Music and film: Study on the borderline of ontology, aesthetics and psychology of film music, Books Lviv, Lviv 1937
• Remarks about the method: From the methodological issues of modern musicology, PIS, Warsaw 1950
• Polish musicology at the turn: Hearing and critical scientific articles (written in the years 1947-1951), PWM, Kraków 1952
• Some aspects of musical aesthetics in the light of articles by Joseph Stalin on Marxism in linguistics, Kraków 1952
• Polish Renaissance music [co-author: Joseph M. Chomiński], PIW, Warszawa 1953
• The special nature of music, PWM [print], Kraków 1953
• The objectivity of rights in Marxist history and theory of music, PWM, Kraków 1954
• Rise of the scholars: Tadeusz Szeligowski, PWM, Kraków 1955
• The history of Russian music, PWM, Kraków 1955
• Vocal music in the first half of the seventeenth century, [co-author: Vladimir Pozniak], in: Universal History of Music, Volume 1 (edited by Joseph M. Chomiński, Zofia Lissa), PWM, Kraków 1957
• Aesthetics of film music, PWM, Kraków 1964
• Sketches from the aesthetics of music [a collection of studies from the years 1938-1964], Kraków 1965
• Studies on the work of Frederic Chopin, PWM, Kraków 1970
• Introduction to Musicology, Oxford University Press 1970
• Polonica Beethoven, PWM, Kraków 1970
• New drafts of the aesthetics of music [a collection of studies from the years 1968-1973], PWM, Kraków 1975