Piotr Maria Poźniak

Piotr Maria Poźniak, a Polish musicologist born in Kraków on 26 October 1939, is a central figure in research on Renaissance music in his country. The son of Włodzimierz Poźniak, he trained in musicology under Szweykowski at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he obtained his master's degree in 1963 and, in 1981, his doctorate with a dissertation devoted to Jakub Reys.

His career combines editorial work with university teaching. From 1962 to 1973 he worked as an editor of early music at the Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne. Since 1973 he has been part of the musicology department of the Jagiellonian University, where he became assistant professor in 1981. His main field is Renaissance music, with particular attention to instrumental music and, above all, lute music.

As an editor, he has prepared numerous critical editions of early Polish music, among them the collection Musica Antiqua Polonica: the Renaissance (1993–94), the Śpiewnik Staropolski, begun in 1995, and the complete works of Jakub Reys, published in 1993. His articles address topics such as the sixteenth-century Polish song, the relationship between voice and instrument in Polish manuscript tablatures, and problems of tonality in the ricercares of Spinacino and Bossinensis.

His legacy lies above all in having made a substantial part of the Polish repertoire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries available to scholars, and in having linked that corpus to European debates on Baroque monody and Renaissance music.