Joanna Bruzdowicz is a Polish composer.

Life

Bruzdowicz studied at the Warsaw Music High School, at the State Higher School of Music (composition with Kazimierz Sikorski and piano with Irena Protasiewicz and Wanda Osakiewicz); she earned her M.A. in 1966. She continued her studies in Paris on a scholarship from the French government and became a student of Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger was a French composer, conductor and teacher who taught many composers and performers of the 20th century.From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, but believing that her talent as a composer was inferior to that of her younger...

, Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen

Olivier Messiaen was a French composer, organist and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex ; harmonically and melodically it is based on modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from his early compositions and improvisations...

 and Pierre Schaeffer (1968–70). She joined the electroacoustic Groupe de Recherches Musicales and wrote her doctoral thesis "Mathematics and Logic in Contemporary Music" at the Sorbonne.

After completing her studies in France, she settled in Belgium with her husband, Horst-Jürgen Tittel, former top advisor to the president of the European Commission

European Commission

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....

. Together, they created the 36-episode German TV series Stahlkammer Zürich for which Bruzdowicz wrote over 15 hours of music. They now live in the South of France. They have three sons: Mark, Jan and Jörg Tittel.

Artistic Range

As a composer she devotes her attention to opera, symphonic and chamber music, works for children, and music for film and television. She wrote four concerti and numerous chamber pieces, as well as over 25 hours of film music. Her compositions are featured on 12 CDs and over 20 LPs; she has been featured in TV programs produced in Belgium, France, Germany and Poland.

Her output includes several operas which brought to the stage some of the greatest works of European literature (e.g. The Penal Colony, after Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

, 1972; The Women of Troy after Euripides

Euripides

Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...

, 1973; and The Gates of Paradise, after Jerzy Andrzejewski

Jerzy Andrzejewski

Jerzy Andrzejewski was a prolific Polish author. His novels, Ashes and Diamonds , and Holy Week , have been made into film adaptations by the Oscar-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda...

, 1987).

Bruzdowicz has a long-standing creative relationship with French film director Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style....

, for whom she composed soundtracks for movies from Sans Toit Ni Loi (engl. Vagabond, Golden Lion in Venice, 1985) to Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (engl. The Gleaners and I), her multiple award-winning documentary.

More recently, her music can be heard in her second collaboration with director Yves Angelo

Yves Angelo

Yves Angelo is a French cinematographer and film director. Angelo has won the César Award for Best Cinematography three times: in 1990 for Nocturne indien, in 1992 for Tous les matins du monde, and in 1994 for Germinal....

, Les Ames Grises (engl. The Grey Souls), the last movie starring the late French comedian Jacques Villeret

Jacques Villeret

Jacques Villeret was a French actor.-Early life and Family:Born Jacky Boufroura in Loches, Indre-et-Loire, France, to an Algerian father and a French mother, he is most famous internationally for his role as François Pignon in Le Dîner de Cons, both on the stage and in the later film...

.