Editorial and journalistic work was an important aspect of Józef Koffler’s professional activity in 1926–1938. He started contributing to periodicals after settling permanently in Lwów in 1924. A year earlier he had obtained a PhD in musicology from the University of Vienna, following in the footsteps of such Viennese musicology graduates from Galicia and Poland as Konrad Zawiłowski (1902), Zdzisław Jachimecki (1906), Józef Reiss (1910), Melania Grafczyńska (1919), and Seweryn Barbag (1922).
Koffler as a Music Writer and Editor of Periodicals
Title pages of periodicals edited by Koffler
Koffler published his texts in five out of the more than twenty Polish music periodicals that came out in various cities in 1918–1939. He contributed to Muzyk Wojskowy (Grudziądz), Muzyka (Warsaw), Orkiestra (Przemyśl), Echo (Lwów), and the specialised Warsaw-based musicological quarterly Kwartalnik Muzyczny. He was also the editor of two of these: Orkiestra in 1930–1938 and Echo in 1936–1937. Besides, he printed regular review columns and other texts in Lwowski Ilustrowany Express Wieczorny (illustrated Lwów daily). Some individual texts appeared in Warsaw’s Wiadomości Literackie (an explication of twelve-note technique), Antena (articles about the radio), and Poznań’s Tęcza (responses to the questionnaire on ‘New Polish Music’; other respondents included Ludomir Różycki, Tadeusz Szeligowski, and Feliks Nowowiejski).
Koffler only occasionally contributed to foreign publications. A tribute in German appeared in a 1934 collective commemorative volume dedicated to Arnold Schönberg on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. In 1940, during the first Soviet occupation of Lwów, Koffler, along with other well-known faculty members of the State Conservatoire, printed a brief Ukrainian-language text in Radyanskaya Muzyka.