For several years, the Polish composer Marta Śniady wrote abstract noise poems. Webs of sound and instrumental energy held tight and taut within precisely judged boundaries, they would gradually unlace to expand their edges and reveal more of what was concealed inside. This was music in the classical mould of sonic abstraction, its origins in the abrasive sonoristic workouts of Śniady’s Polish predecessors – Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Szalonek, Zygmunt Krauze and others – but updated with post-ambient pace and post-millennial tension.
Photo Credit: Bartek Sadowski
But Śniady wanted more than this. ‘After a few years, I was getting comfortable – and bored … I felt I had to go forward and do something exciting’, she told the composer and performer James Black in 2019. Despite having finished her formal education, she began taking lessons with Simon Steen-Andersen and Niels Rønsholdt at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark: two composers with a wide view of what constitutes musical activity. These studies enlarged Śniady’s perspective to embrace audio playback, video and theatre, elements that came to the fore for the first time in her hour-long meme-opera (2016). As if the pent-up energies of her earlier music have burst their formalistic frame, these later works are like shattered mirrors: riots of puns, gags, self-deprecation and lines of angled light.
Photo Credit: Bartek Sadowski
Since 2017, Śniady’s work has focused on a series of themes that intersect like cracks in glass: women’s experiences of identity, desire, body image and wellness, digitalisation, media saturation and hyper-commodification. in the pink, for one or two marimbas, video and audio playback, chains together clips of beauty treatments, and advertisements, while the marimba players mimic on their instruments the actions of flossing, massaging or waxing, to create an audio-visual collage whose different dimensions work often in ironic counterpoint to each other. you make me feel so brand new (2019) for voice, sampler, video and audio playback performs something similar around the themes of love, dating and sex work, culminating in a touching pop ballad of Śniady’s own creation.
Photo Credit: Bartek Sadowski
Both pieces are taken from the hour-long Your ultimate guide on how to live, written for the Danish Scenatet ensemble (who perform it in fluorescent pink wigs). A major artistic statement, it takes as its theme happiness and how to achieve it – whether through health and beauty, fulfilment and success (YOUR ONLY LIMIT IS YOU), love and personal connection, or egotistic pleasure (probably the most beautiful music in the world) – and Śniady has pursued the topic further in 4 ritual of women’s happiness (2020) and soft music for sensitive gals (2021). The latter showcases the dark irony that underpins all Śniady’s work, as footage of Diana Prince transforming into Wonder Woman (in the 1970s TV serial starring Lynda Carter) and warped as though shown on a mistracked videotape, plays against music that is by turns enraptured and unsettling, particularly as the footage is overlaid with shots of leering, uniformed men.
Photo Credit: Bartek Sadowski
How Can I Help You?, which will be premiered at Warsaw Autumn and receives its UK premiere from the London Sinfonietta at hcmf//, is accompanied by a quotation from the Polish author and therapist Joanna Flis: ‘When we return to those times, we will see children writing in each other’s diaries a poem that still resonates like a mantra in the ears of many of us today: “Laugh among people, cry only in secret. Be light-footed in your dancing, but never in your life.”’ The line comes from Flis’s recent book, What’s Wrong With Me? On Living in a Dysfunctional Home Environment, and Poland, and How We (Don’t) Cope With It, a study of dissatisfaction among a generation of adults raised in Poland by overprotective parents and within an over-demanding education system. Śniady’s focus remains the collapse of identity and self-assurance under late-stage capitalism, but here it expands from the personal to the social and perhaps even universal.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Tickets for London Sinfonietta’s performance of the UK Premiere of Marta Śniady‘s How Can I Help You? (2025) are on sale here.