: An At-tempt at an Acoustic Biography of Bruno Schulz. Auditory Experiences

The article analyzes the potential sonic experiences of Bruno Schulz. The numerous references to music in his prose inspire questions about Schulz’s attitude towards music. Based on the testimonies of his family and friends, it is impossible to determine Schulz’s opinion on the art of sounds, or whether he was musical and what kind of music he listened to. The ‘acoustic biography’ presented here becomes a metaphor for Schulz’s probable auditory experiences. Arranged in the chronological order, it respects the principles of probability, and is based on the historical and cultural context of 19th- and 20th-century Poland.

the face of the limited archive, the musical culture during Schulz's "age of genius" can give some idea on the subject.A speculative acoustic biography would allow us to identify the sources of the linguistic shaping of the artistic text.It would consist of the writer's sound experiences -located in a speci c historical and cultural moment.To reconstruct how the music of the end of the 19th century and the rst decades of the 20th century in uenced Schulz is to see what musical experiences people (not only those artistically talented) might have had at that time.

Defencelessness in the face of the world of sounds
e world of sounds a ects a person throughout their life, even before birth.As Anna Chęćka-Gotkowicz notes, in the mother's womb the baby perceives sounds from the very beginning and retains this vulnerability towards acoustic phenomena until death3 .If a person can cut themselves o from visual sensations (by closing the eyes), then closing themselves o from auditory sensations is physiologically impossible (at the quietest moment, we hear the "whoosh of blood" or the beating of our own heart) 4 .is kind of "sound violence" means that even if we would like to imagine inspired Schulz writing e Cinnamon Shops in silence, or standing among focused students in a soundless (muted) hall, walking around the empty and soundless market square in Drohobych, we know that such a state was impossible.Schulz had to participate in the soundscape of the place.Even if he did not want to.
We also have evidence that he su ered because of noise.In a letter to Tadeusz Breza, he wrote about how tiring his work at school was: "I feel disheartened: I wasn't given the leave I counted on so much.I'm staying at school in Drohobych, where this rabble will continue to frolic and play on my nerves.You must know that my nerves have scattered throughout the entire handicra workshop, spread on the oor, wallpapered the walls, and covered the workshops and the anvil with thick woven fabric" 5 .We also know that he wanted musical silence, a pause, a relaxation that would be a natural element of work.In a letter to Andrzej Pleśniewicz, he complained: "You overestimate the bene ts of my situation in Drohobych.What I miss here is silence, my own musical silence, a calm pendulum, subject to its own gravity, with a clean line of track, undisturbed by any foreign in uence. is silence, substantial, positive -complete -is almost creativity itself.ese matters that I believe I want to express happen above a certain threshold of silence, and they are formed in a centre brought to perfect balance.Even the peace I have here, even though more perfect than in that happier era, has become insu cient for an increasingly sensitive, more fastidious vision.It is getting harder and harder for me to believe it.And these things require blind faith, taken on credit.Only a er being united by this faith do they agree to struggle to be -to exist to some degree"6 .
Based on Schulz's self-characterization, one may conclude that time had a musical character for Schulz.A er the sequence of events (sounds) there must have been "stillness", the silence which could be formed like plastic material which conditions creativity.e moment before creation (of the presented world) was essential to him.In the tension of silence, in the moment before the performance (of a sound or word), the writer became similar to a musician: the longer the silence lasted, the greater the desire was to ll it with sound, to ll the void with content.Finally, Schulz's confession is a sign of lack of relaxation or rest coupled with work, like silence and sound7 .A musical work strives for external silence, gravitates towards non-existence, and lasts as long as the artist performs the music.erefore, there is always more external silence (understood even as the sounds of the world) than organized sound matter.Schulz seems to be saying, however, that there was silence within the composition, a fermata or musical pause which co-created the work and organized sound structures and musical thought.
According to Chęćka-Gotkowicz, the duration of a pause in musical notation varies -it usually depends on the adopted tempo and rhythmic value.It is o en colloquially understood as "breath", "rest", "hold", or "a sigh" in French.In silence the sound of a (musical) thought resonates, it coexists inseparably with the sound and becomes present only in its "context".Musical breath allows you to stop in time and feel your own existence 8 .Musical time -the time perceived by Schulz is therefore characterized by alternating appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, sound and silence, being and non-being 9 .For Schulz, musical silence was a condition for creation.is need and necessity for silence was perfectly expressed by the Indian mystic Kirpal Singh, who wrote that "the essence of sound is felt in both motion and silence, it passes from existent to nonexistent.When there is no sound, it is said that there is no hearing, but that does not mean that hearing has lost its preparedness.Indeed, when there is no sound, hearing is most alert, and when there is sound the hearing nature is least developed"10 .
In order to be creative, Schulz needed musical silence.With its potential he was perhaps weaving a story about the soundscape of his hometown.Polluting this pristine time of creation with noise -sonic violence -paralyzed his imagination.In silence, the senses could sharpen to new (or old, imaginative) experiences; the "space of silence" enabled an aesthetic experience.He repeated this in a letter to Stefan Szuman, when he wrote about Rilke's poetry: "It is a very quiet, closed-in world -you have to go very far from the noise and go very deep to hear this poetry"11 .

Auditory experiences. Passive hearing -active listening
e impact of sounds on humans has been studied by anthropology of sound (sound studies).Sounds of the world, perceived consciously and unconsciously, contribute to the creation of personality, they have the ability to create emotional states.Audial experiences of a human being include their entire audiosphere, that is, the sound environment perceived by the sense of hearing, including the melosphere (music), the sonosphere (sounds) and the phonosphere (voice) 12 .It builds the sonic identity of an individual, shapes their sensitivity and the way they perceive reality.e multitude of such identities in the similar sound space creates entire "acoustic communities".e sound image of Drohobych re ected the nature of the local community, its needs, features and preferences.e (sound) world of this community consisted primarily of natural sounds, perfectly described in e Cinnamon Shops: biophones, for example, swarms of "buzzing" ies, birds apping their wings, horses clattering their hooves; geophones -the noise of alder trees, the sound of wind during a storm; anthrophones -the performances of organ grinders, the tolling of church bells, the clatter of women's shoes… ese sensory experiences allowed Schulz to "recreate" the genius loci, the sounds of the space; they allowed him to re ect the di erence and uniqueness of the sound landscape of the place where he lived.Maybe the sentimental description of the harmony of childhood sounds was for him a response to the sonic violence associated with schoolwork, changes and new acoustic landscape (today known as "noise pollution" 13 ): ubiquitous noise, technological, industrial, and urban revolutions, the bustle of factories or the roar of gunshots during the war, which announced the disintegration of the world 14 .Today, researchers have no doubt that both conscious and unconscious audio experiences related to nature and human activity shape us profoundly.Although at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries eld recording did not exist yet 15 (the rst such recordings were made in the 1930s and 1940s 16 ), based on the testimonies and the historical and cultural context, we can collect and "recreate" Schulz's hypothetical auditory experiences.

Anacrusis. Childhood
Little do we know about what musical experiences the childhood of Schulz consisted of.In his ction, the sound of creaking oors, snoring of counter jumpers (sleeping on the lowest oors of the tenement house), the rumble of kitchen appliances and banging of tin pots in the attic resonate through the narrator's house; it sounds of the clatter of servant's slippers and trills with a high bird's clangour.One may assume that Schulz's childhood involved almost exclusively passive listening that was hardly the result of conscious choice.Young Schulz took part in a performance of Izydor, eleven years older than him; he went to the opera with his parents and, amazed, he listened to street musicians stopping by the windows of the tenement house -which he would later illustrate and describe in Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.He played with mechanical instruments and music boxes, which he would soon write about in " e Comet".In his family home, there might have been a music box or a miniature barrel organ, present in most middle-class houses at that time 17 , perhaps even similar to the one he would describe years later in e Booke.It can be assumed that he was taken to klezmer concerts, which made the atmosphere of parks and spontaneously arranged garden restaurants more attractive.He took part in traditional celebrations (such as bar mitzvah) accompanied by Jewish live music.Schulz's family most likely took an active part in artistic events, just like most Jewish families did in the Truskavets-Boryslav-Drohobych district who had access to culture and education.As a junior high school student, he participated in school performances; he also listened to liturgical songs during services to which the students went together.However, he did not recognize a musical talent in himself and remained absorbed in visual arts.
In an essay devoted to the work of Ephraim Moses Lilien, Schulz described his rst form-creating contact with art.He recalled the book his brother borrowed for him when he was fourteen.It was Songs from the Ghetto with a collection of poems by Morris Rosenfeld, translated from Yiddish into German (Lieder des Ghetto), with Lilien's drawings.e book consisted of simple and extremely melodic, rhythmic songs describing the work of Jewish workers, especially tailors (the author of the song spent his youth in exile in America, earning a living as a tailor) 18 .
Supplemented with black and white drawings, Rosenfeld's poems cover such topics as work, love, and death.What seems most interesting in the context of music in Schulz's life and work is the way he described the rst encounter with Rosenfeld's collection, his " rst spring of sensitivity", his "mystical marriage with art". is is what he wrote about that moment: "When I opened the covers with the weeping willow and the harp, I was dazzled.From the solemn silence that suddenly occurred within me, I realized that I was standing at the gate of a great and decisive experience, and I turned the pages of this book, stunned, with a somewhat joyful fear and happy, moving from one delight to another.I spent the whole day reading Lilien's book, enchanted, unable to put it down, I was full of shining black and white chords brimming with pathos, rising from the silence of these cards and ornaments" 19 .e breakthrough that then took place lled Schulz with sounds: thanks to the aesthetic experience, he himself became music -visual impressions evoked associations with the auditory experience, the senses mixed, and Rosenfeld's songs evoked instruments in his imagination; Schulz heard musical compositions in them.His rst conscious experience of art thus became a half-(imagined) musical experience.Such events o en create an artistic language, which, with references to the art of sounds, allow us to describe di erent matters such as literature or painting.
A little later, Schulz reviewed Lilien's work.e musical metaphor would remain a constant point of reference for him: "He is immediately characterized by a strong sense of linear rhythm, to which he subordinates all other forms of expression.Almost each of his drawings is based on a rhythm that permeates it and runs unstoppably like a triumphant fanfare, taking in and unifying all the details of the drawing with its wave. is rhythm, this inner melody takes us immediately to a festive and solemn sphere, to the dimension of pure and sublime poetry […] white and shiny lines rise as a triumphant cantilena on the shining carbuncle of the night […] it is strong and intoxicating poetry, hypnotizing with its solemn gesture or solemn, incanting dance of slender gures made as if from white silence, accompanied by the humming of night-black chords.From the con icts of black and white, Lilien extracted the crystalline music of the spheres.He dedicates all the other melodies to this one"20 . is way of writing about drawings persists throughout most of the argument, in which Schulz particularly o en emphasizes the importance of rhythm.e ornamentation was -in his opinion -painted with a "decisive rhythm", kept the "same rhythmic character", and the viewer's eye followed the same rhythm of each vignette.e book was "composed", "tuned steadfastly and contrapuntally into an integral whole" 21 .e fourteen-year-old Schulz -at least that is how he described himself more than 30 years later -noticed the melodiousness and rhythm of the Rosenfeld song; he "heard" music not only in the poetic text itself, he also noticed analogies to it in the drawings as such.It is di cult to imagine that constant musical metaphors would accompany a writer who was indi erent to sound matters.What experiences might he have had with the music of his time, then?Was it shaped by a great neo-romantic symphony (Strauss, Rachmanino ), musical impressionism (Debussy), verismo (Puccini, Moniuszko), or a much earlier tradition (Mozart, Chopin), maybe the avant-garde music of the time, or perhaps American light jazz?Roman Jasiński, a pianist, immortalized in the photo with Schulz and Witkacy from 1934 27 , in the publication Koniec epoki.Muzyka w Warszawie reconstructed musical events in the capital in the years 1927-1939 and the situation of cultural institutions at that time.He recalled that many famous artists came to Warsaw at that time: " ose were the times when its [the Warsaw Philharmonic's] existence was closely connected with usually attractive, frequent performances by foreign artists of world fame.Warsaw had never seen such a galaxy of the greatest virtuosos and composers moving across the Philharmonic's stage.It is safe to say that there was no such outstanding artist in the world at that time who would not have visited the Warsaw stage at least once" 28 .
e greatest stars gave concerts at the Warsaw Philharmonic, Karol Szymanowski performed on regular basis 29 .Schulz visited the capital many times in the years 1924-1938, mainly to establish personal and professional contacts 30 .We are not sure how he spent his time with the Polish artistic elite.We only know that he went to the theatre with Nałkowska, celebrated New Year 1935 with Gombrowicz, posed for Witkacy's making a portrait of him, was immortalized in a photo with artists during a party, and o en visited Kuncewiczowa 31 .He talked to writers primarily about art, philosophy, and his own prose.Did they go to the philharmonic and the opera?Since attending performances and concerts was part of the social life of Polish artists at that time, that might have been the case.e meetings were o en enriched by musical performances.A er the war, Hanna Mortkowicz-Olczakowa notes in her memoirs that during a party celebrating the publication of e Stranger at Kuncewiczowa's house in Warsaw, Schulz witnessed the violinist Irena Dubińska playing Brahms' concerto in D major 32 .
It is also known that he went to the theatre with Izabela Czermakowa, who would remember his fear and peculiar "sensitivity to sounds".In her memoirs from 1958, published a few years later in "Twórczość", Czermakowa wrote: "I remember a wonderful evening when Bruno, in a quiet, so voice, read fragments of his Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass; the book was published much later.[…] Once we went to the neighbouring Truskavets.It was a sunny but cold October.Bright dahlias bloomed in the empty old spa park. at day, Bruno was particularly talkative, he talked about his agoraphobia, his excessive sensitivity to sounds, and the fact that he only lived in depth, not in breadth, like other people"33 .Czermakowa came to Drohobych many times and spent long hours with Schulz on evening walks around his hometown.However, she did not elaborate on what Schulz might have had in mind at that time -how he perceived the sounds of the world, how they in uenced him, whether he considered this sensitivity to sounds as a burdensome condition, or for the ability that allowed him to "hear more".She focused on the writer's attachment to Drohobych, which he predicted would become the place of his death.
A summary of music events in several major cities the writer visited would include these: Vienna (1914-1918, 1923), Warsaw (1924-1938), Lviv (1911-1914,  1923, 1937) and Paris (1938) 34 , as well as the repertoire of operas and theatres.Still, we cannot con rm the thesis that Schulz actively listened to music and attended performances.e only traces of operatic experiences can be found in his collections of stories.In e Cinnamon Shops, Schulz refers to Twilight of the Gods, one of the four parts of the musical drama of Wagner's opera e Ring of the Nibelungen: "We o en liked to listen at the door -the silence, full of sighs and whispers of this rubble crumbling in cobwebs, this twilight of the gods decaying in boredom and monotony" 35 .In "Spring", he recalls Don Juan (following either Molier's play or Don Giovanni with music by Mozart).In his prose, he refers to classical and klezmer music.e narrator listening to a performance in "Spring" 36 equates nature with instruments, perhaps travestying musical drama.

Repertoire of the sanatorium
Before World War II, Schulz stayed in several resort towns 37 .According to the memories of Irena Kejlin-Mitelman, in 1922, he visited the spa town of Bad Kudowa located in the Sudetes.at is where he met her mother.e moment of the meeting was accompanied by music that could be heard at the bench where Schulz was sitting.
Health resorts, apart from treatments, o ered various attractions and activities such as artistic performances, dances or excursions.Some of them were equipped with libraries and recreation rooms.Mitelman's story shows that Schulz was reluctant to leave the spa.e only thing that excited him was the Skull Chapel38 .Perhaps the introverted ne artist was not interested in concerts or dances: he was more willing to spend time with friends or alone, drawing or reading.
Marienbad, where he stayed in 1915, had a rich artistic program to o er39 .ere were, among others, classical music concerts and performances by musicians who were relaxing in the resort.Schulz had the opportunity to go to one of the o cial dances in Kursaal.ree times a day, the spa guests could enjoy performances by the spa orchestra.String quartets and orchestras played in restaurants.He could listen to classical and popular music performed by dancing bands, as well as folk music played by Gypsy bands40 .It is di cult to say what his attitude towards music performed in resorts was.It was perhaps just a background for his social life.Based on Schulz's alleged musical experiences, one might say that music performed in the park (in resorts in Truskavets) stimulated musical metaphors, and the restaurant musicians in Marienbad may have inspired parts of "Spring" related to music.Schulz attended (either willingly or reluctantly) chamber concerts.He listened to music performed in informal circumstances, in rooms, small halls and parks.It seems that the intimate atmosphere and the natural environment in which he listened to music inspired him the most.

Musical culture in the Drohobych high school
As a student and later a teacher at the pre-war Władysław Jagiełło High School in Drohobych, Schulz probably also came across several musical genres: classical compositions, folk, religious and popular music (e.g.jazz, popular in the 1930s) 41 .He listened to music in church several times a year, assuming that as a teacher he was obliged to participate in masses that inaugurated major school events.It is not known whether religious art was a source of inspiration or, on the contrary, it was a forced part of education and later paid work.High school reports show that, as a teacher, he watched many school performances throughout the year 42 .Student productions included mainly patriotic repertoire.erefore, Schulz listened to songs and anthems performed by the school choir, as well as compositions reaching back to the folk tradition (for example Dudziarz by Wieniawski) 43 .One of the reports recorded the repertoire in detail, which gives us an idea about musical experiences at the school.e reporter mentions Hlawiak's "Miłość ojczyzny" [Love of the Homeland], Wybicki's "Mazurek Dąbrowskiego" and Żukowski's "Wieniec pieśni strzeleckich" [Wreath of Shooting Songs] 44 .
In the years 1929-1938, Professor Schulz might have listened to an average of two artistic programs a month.ere are no sources about his attitude towards the music performed at the school -if we do not count the confessions in letters in which he disapproved of his workplace as such 45 .One can venture to say that the artistic culture of the school in some way shaped its student, and later its employee.Patriotic performances by choirs of boys and men and the school orchestra periodically reminded the writer of the history of Poland; radio broadcasts introduced him to more important compositions and they presented composers (Mozart, Chopin, Schubert).anks to theoretical and practical classes, Schulz had the opportunity to learn musical forms and techniques, such as symphony, fugue, sonatina, to which he would refer many times in prose and reviews 46 .However, it is impossible to determine if he took an active part in the artistic life of the school -at least as a teacher.If we assume that he was forced to watch performances that bored him, this type of musical experience also had an impact -it must have discouraged him from music for a long time.Regardless of whether the writer's attitude towards artistic events was a rmative or critical, there is no doubt that the atmosphere of school events in uenced him and le a mark on his musical experiences.

Experiencing pop music: klezmer, folk, jazz
Schulz certainly listened to the music of the early 20th century, knew the musical tradition and popular music played by gramophones and barrel organs.He attended musical events, saw band performances, heard klezmer music popular in Drohobych and listened to music in restaurants, parks and in the streets.In the interwar period, there was no city whose streets would not be lled with fair, orchestral or klezmer music.e Drohobych region was no exception.At that time, the townspeople were frequently exposed to amateur music.Issachar Fater, author of a publication devoted to musicians of Jewish origin, points to the ubiquity of music among the Jewish community in the interwar Poland: " e Jewish masses in Poland sang everywhere and always.ere was no need to look for songs, because they could be heard at every step -maids, tailor's apprentices, girls sitting at home and Hasidic boys, modest mothers and rude, simple coachmen sang songs.Rich children sang because they were bursting with joy, and poor orphans to express their grief and resentment.And these songs were very di erent: street songs 'about the bitter fate of an orphan' , sentimental tangos about broken hearts, songs of the working class calling 'not to let others drink their blood anymore' , pioneering, encouraging people to build a country and settle in it, Hasidic songs calling for dancing and the cantor's tear-jerking singing.We could also hear serious classical songs from the world music repertoire" 47 .Schulz listened to the music of the streets of Drohobych.e Jewish community there was particularly musical.In e Book of Klezmer.e History, the Music, the Folklore memories of a Drohobych resident about the performances are presented: "In my town of Drohobych the klezmorim played Yiddish folksongs as well as swing, fox-trots, rhumba, cha-cha, waltzes, Russian songs, and so on.Many learned how to read music so they could play the tune exactly as it had been recorded.ere were klezmorim who had such a good ear that they could write down exactly what they heard on the radio a er listening to the tune only once.ey not only wrote the melody line but the harmony and rhythm parts for all the instruments.I played in one band where we played a lot of the music from the radio, which came to Drohobych in the 1930s.e leader was Dr. Staszek Vilder.He was very clever, with a great ear.He wrote the parts for saxophone, trumpet, piano, bass, and two violins.I played in this ensemble for weddings, restaurants, and even for the silent lms.We used to play 'Bar Kokhba' under Tom Mix and Valentino lms" 48  writer's reaction to the promiscuity of Parisian cocottes 49 .It was in the capital of France that the cabaret was born, dominated by songs touching upon current socio-political issues.In the 1930s, a district of Montmartre already had the status of the artistic centre of Paris.e twenty-three-year-old Edith Piaf performed there, too, at the time 50 .Performances competed with the cinema, so they had to be more attractive to the viewers.e musical and visual impressions that Paris provided Schulz with were much stronger than those he had access to in Poland (he wrote about this to Romana Halpern: "I saw beautiful, shocking, and terrible things.I was greatly impressed by the wonderful women […], promiscuity, pace of life" 51 ).
At the end of the 19th century, factories in Łódź and Warsaw produced the rst gramophones.At the beginning of the 20th century, the cinematography and phonography ourished, lm studios and cinemas were established and became popular.Music publishing houses were founded, and garden theatres were set up.Technical progress allowed for wider access to music.e organ grinders were gradually replaced by actors and cabaret performers, and the place of popular home musical boxes (mini-grinders, music boxes) was taken by gramophones and radios -more modern devices which played not one, but hundreds of songs 52 .
e appearance of the radio in Drohobych in the 1930s provided access to popular and classical music 53 .Schulz not only read his own works 54 on the radio, but also listens to hits played on gramophone records.e radio had a very ambitious program.In addition to fragments of prose from around the world, you could also listen to great concerts, recitals, and all kinds of classical music 55 .Soon, Schulz would also be able to listen to music in the cinema.His brother Izydor founded the Urania cinema in Drohobych at the beginning of the 20th century, which Schulz attended as a child and teenager 56 .ese experiences are perhaps what he presented later in "Noc lipcowa" ["A Night in July"]: "I spent the nights of that summer in the town's only cinema, staying there until the end of the last performance" 57 .He probably also went to the cinema in Lviv, Vienna and Warsaw.Małgorzata Hendrykowska wrote: "Due to the universality of the shows themselves and the variety of places of exhibitions, it should be assumed that […] already around 1907 it was simply impossible not to get familiar with cinema" 58 .What movies did he watch?What did he listen to?Until the 1930s, that is until lms got sound, he mainly looked at images in silent lms, even though some screenings were accompanied by live music -by pianists and entire bands, later replaced by gramophone records.
In the 1920s, Polish cinema was dominated by propaganda and patriotic repertoire (Cud nad Wisłą, Pan Tadeusz, Trędowata, Grób nieznanego żołnierza 59 ).With the development of sound lm, as a well-formed writer, Schulz could listen to recordings of e Jazz Singer by the Warner brothers and Moralność pani Dulskiej by Bolesław Nawolin 60 ; he could also watch the adaptations of Nałkowska's Granica or Żeromski's Wierna rzeka 61 .

Coda
Even though Schulz's statements about music and titles indicating the connection between the text and the musical work are not as numerous as in the case of Witkacy's Sonata Belzebuba, his prose contains extensive references to music, which allows us to assume that music could have been the subject of unknown metatextual statements that did not survive the war -a er all, most of Schulz's correspondence, several stories, the manuscript of Messiah, and also many of his drawings were lost.e references to music in prose inspire us to look for some connections Schulz might have had with the art of sounds -so easily visible in the works of other writers.Recreating Schulz's hypothetical acoustic experiences has also a broader dimension -it provides insight into the sphere of potential musical experiences of interwar writers, who o en attempted to describe musical composition.rough the prism of music in Schulz's life and work, one can nally see not only him, but also the cultural context: how popular music was present in the acoustic space in the interwar period, what role school education played in Schulz's musical tastes, what repertoire the operas and theatres had, what could be listened to on the radio and in cabaret, and what those songs were about.Research in this eld will make us aware of what was listened to in the "prehistory" of great technological development -it will help us see in the barrel organ the rst attempts at making music a mass phenomenon, and to realize how the sound landscape of the world from over a hundred years ago di ered from the one we have today.
Given the rich orchestration of Schulz's prose, the question about his voice in the matter of music, about his musical modes of expression and about his attitude to sounds becomes an obvious call for research, even though -perhaps -doomed to weaving an argument from scraps of memories and guesswork.Acoustic biography will therefore be one way of making sense of the author's life, which -like any type of biography -passes selected facts through its lter (sometimes artistically distorting them to suit its needs) 62 . is is undoubtedly a metaphor; nevertheless, there is an important supplement behind it to the socalled comprehensive biography (postulated, but probably never completed).It may turn out that there is no biography, but only biographies, fragments, ideas.62 Schulz's music-related experiences described here include the activity of the Jewish artistic society "Kaleia", numerous contacts with musicians, and nally his sound experiences during the Nazi occupation.Schulz's sonic "biography" was certainly much more extensive and research on it deserves to be continued.

13
Raymond Murray Scha er wrote about noise pollution of the world's soundscape from the perspective of music ecology.14 I use the terminology systematized by Sebastian Bernat in Wokół pojęcia soundscape.Dyskusja terminologiczna, "Prace Komisji Krajobrazu Kulturowego" 2015, no. 30, p. 45-57.15 I use a well-established English term meaning practical and technical eld recordings, i.e. recording sounds outside the studio space, later saved as digital audio les.16 Between 1930 and 1960, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was the rst to do eld recording.
He recorded the sounds of work in the port and on the coast.In 1940, Ludwig Koch used the phonograph to record bird sounds, later released on gramophone records.See https://www.irvteibel.com (retrieved: 21 January 2020).17 Prószyński was convinced of the mass presence of barrel organs or music boxes in townspeople's homes at the end of the 19th century.See S. Prószyński, Blaski i cienie dziejów katarynek, in: idem, Świat mechanizmów grających, Warszawa 1994, p. 205.

Schulz as a music lover? Musical culture in some European cities in 1910-1940
During World War I, Schulz was in Vienna.One of the most important European opera houses, the Vienna Opera, then known as the Hof-Operntheater, o ered world premieres of the greatest works.At that very time, in the cultural centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Schulz had the opportunity to see e Knight of the Rose by Richard Strauss, Parsifal by Richard Wagner, Notre Dame by Franz Schmidt 22 .However, considering his poor nancial situation (he regularly received aid for refugees 23 ), most likely he could not a ord to actively participate in the artistic life of the capital city.His nancial situation had improved slightly when he visited Vienna in 1923.In the years 1918-1939 in the capital of Austria, the greatest works of world music were performed, including Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi or Der Rosenkavalier by Strauss 24 .Schulz had many opportunities to see performances in Poland, too.e opera house in Lviv had been continuously o ering a repertoire of the highest quality since the second half of the 18th century.At the beginning of the 20th century, on the stages of the Lviv Opera you could watch Italian and French performances, for example La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi, Carmen by Georges Bizet, Faust by Charles Gounod, Madame Butter y by Giacomo Puccini, Eugene Onegin by Pyotr Tchaikovsky.e frequently performed Halka, a Polish opera by Stanisław Moniuszko also achieved worldwide fame 25 .According to Michał Piekarski, in Lviv before 1918 (Schulz was a student of the Lviv Polytechnic then) one could attend Polish private views, including as many as six Wagner operas (Lohengrin, e Flying Dutchman, Rienzi, Das Rheingold, Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods).Later, the opera house held premieres of great works, including Eros and Psyche by Ludomir Różycki and Salome by Strauss 26 .
. However, it is not only Drohobych and Poland that bring musical experiences to Schulz.He spent August 1938 in Paris.His guide in the world of French leisure was Georges Rosenberg (brother of Schulz's friend, pianist Maria Chasin) with whom he had long conversations about philosophy and art.Rosenberg especially remembers going to the cabaret Casanova in Montmartre and the 47 I. Fater, Muzyka żydowska w Polsce w okresie międzywojennym, przeł.E. Świderska, Warsaw 1997, p. 12. 48 Interview with Mikhle Lepert, Wrocław, 12.03.1984,quoted in: Y. Strom, The Book of Klezmer: The History, the Music, the Folklore, Chicago 2011, p. 113.