KEW
From Unearthing The Music
KEW is a Polish group formed in 1973 by composers Krzysztof Knittel, Elżbieta Sikora and Wojciech Michniewski when they were all students at the Fryderyk Chopin Higher State School of Music in Warsaw. The group's name comes from its members initials.
At the time of the group's founding, the three composers were already well on their way to notoriety: Elżbieta Sikora had already been a student at the (1968-1970) Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris under the guidance of Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle and had performed in France several times. Wojciech Michniewski (who had graduated with honours from the Department of Composition, Conducting and Theory of Music) was giving numerous performances and was rumoured to be close to earning the Orfeusz, the main award for the best performance of a Polish composition at the Warsaw Autumn Festival of Contemporary Music. Krzysztof Knittel was already successful in the area of popular music and still actively enriching his knowledge: he took part in courses on the Fortran programming language and attended lectures on mathematical and humanistic logics and on theories of probability.
For these composers, KEW was a shared adventure in intuitive action - composed or spontaneously improvised - where the unspeakable became a shared experience and expression, an emanation of spirituality unexpected by the artists themselves. In their work there is an indication of the climate of student creativity of that era - the cult of wandering, experiencing readings together, looking beyond everyday life, a fascination with exoticism.