Kabir

Premiere of Tomasz Wierzbowski's composition for Kabir's poetry translated by Czesław Miłosz (Studio VoiceLab)

“Kabir” is an author's compositional project by Tomasz Wierzbowski based on the poetry of the medieval Indian mystic Kabir, translated by Czesław Miłosz. The series of compositions was created as part of the Artistic Scholarship of the President of Wroclaw and will be presented to the public for the first time on October 30, 2026.

The starting point of the project is the meeting of two seemingly distant worlds — Indian and European culture. The poetic texts, which are the basis of the project, although they come from a distant cultural context, are characterized by surprising universalism, relatedness of questions and sensitivity, pointing to a community of reflection on spirituality, transience and human experience. As Miłosz wrote in the introduction to his translations, Kabir's poetry “does not sound foreign to us” *, but “bears witness to the similarities rather than differences between India and our Mediterranean coasts.” This idea is one of the foundations of the project.

The musical layer develops this idea through the author's three-voice compositions in natural attire. Microtonal structures, present in many musical traditions of the East, are juxtaposed with the Western context: polyphonic texture, the sound of the Polish language and the contemporary compositional language. The purpose of this meeting is not to emphasize the difference between the two traditions, but to create a harmonious synthesis and search for a common musical language, to deepen the cultural rapprochement that Miłosz achieved in his poetic translations of these texts.

The compositions will be performed by Studio VoiceLab — the only group in Poland specializing in working with the polyvowel in systems other than uniformly tempered.

Project management by Aleksandra Kotecka, Tomasz Wierzbowski

Studio VoiceLab composed by: Aleksandra Kotecka, Tomasz Wierzbowski, Zuzanna Dobrzańska, Marta Łowejko, Monika Niedźwiedzka, Bartłomiej Mikuła

* Czesław Miłosz, “Poetic Translations”, Znak, Kraków 2005, p. 363. ** Ibid., p. 363.