Kwartety smyczkowe Hanny Kulenty. Pamięć gatunku a współczesne środki ekspresji

In the work of Hanna Kulenty, a string quartet appears as a significant form of artistic expression. Its successive incarnations (6 quartets created in 1983-2014) illustrate the evolution of the musical language of composers, her approach to the problem of form, time, space, and sound. The article is an attempt to capture the idiomatic features of this music, presented in the context of Bakhtin’s theory of genre as a representative of creative memory, and to indicate the place of quartets in contemporary chamber music by Polish composers.