Res Facta Nova
Res Facta Nova is an academic journal devoted to contemporary music. From the beginning (it was founded in 1967), regardless of the vicissitudes of Polish culture and cultural policies, it has been an important landmark in the musicological, critical-musical and music-related writings in Poland. Among the journal’s founders were Michał Bristiger, Stefan Jarociński, Józef Patkowski and Mieczysław Tomaszewski.
Res Facta Nova concentrates on publishing articles concerning contemporary music compositions (from Poland and abroad), as well as texts on issues such as the semiotics, aesthetics, philosophy, sociology and psychology of music, with particular focus on contemporary art. Alongside original scholarly articles the journal also publishes translations of significant foreign texts on musicology that have attracted international discussions, as well as polemical reviews. From the year 2000 the journal has been including publications in English, and articles by foreign authors writing on Polish contemporary music play an important role among them.
The history of Res Facta (Nova) reaches back to 1967. The journal’s leading idea was to offer Polish readers the most important and exceptional texts on contemporary ideas about music in their broadest sense, referring to the traditions of European and non-European cultures. Adhering to this principle, the founders and editors were aware of the growing need to acquaint the Polish musicological community (as well as the wider public) with what was being published and widely discussed outside Poland. It was in the columns of Res Facta and Res Facta Nova (from 1994) that the outstanding composers, musicologists, critics and philosophers who were to influence the future generations of native artists and intellectuals made their first appearance in Poland. They included John Cage, Olivier Messiaen, Witold Lutosławski, Carl Dahlhaus, Paul Ricoeur, Hans Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno, and now Karol Berger, Reinhold Brinkmann, Eero Tarasti, Gérard Grisey, Paweł Szymański and Paweł Mykietyn.
After 1989, with the arrival of Maciej Jabłoński as editor, the journal was published as Res Facta Nova in Poznań, first by Ars Nova, and from its second issue (in 1997) by Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk [the Poznań Society of Friends of Learning]. Since 2016 the journal has been published by its original publisher, Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne. In 2021 it was awarded 40 points in the index of academic journals of the Minister of Science and Higher Education. Since 2010 its academic partner has been the Institute of Musicology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
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