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Abstract
Warsaw's Experimental Studio of Polish Radio (1957–2004) was integral to public media production in Poland. At the its consoles, composers and engineers studied acoustics, made incidental sounds for television, radio, and film, and composed large-scale works that circulated at new music festivals around the world during the Cold War. Their tape-oriented poetics, acoustic play, archival whimsy, and electronic production shaped the media imaginary of Polish science fiction, and provided soundtracks for radio plays and animated films for decades. Since its closure it has continued to generate creative projects that weave together an analogue electronic music past with the digital electronic music present. This article opens the doors to the Polish studio by following its central material, magnetic tape, through a range of contexts: the first composition realised at its consoles, a hip-hop history of the Polish twentieth century, as part of a cold-war gift economy among artist friends, and as the basis of a sample pack offered to users of the digital audio workstation Ableton Live. This material history reveals a range of uses for tape that urge us to revisit what it means for an arts institution under state socialism to frame its relationship to society as utilitarian.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to Contemporary Music Review for useful suggestions, as well as to Jonathan Goldman, Fanny Gribenski, and João Romão for envigorating and rigorous conversations, as well as convening the workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. The other participants offered creative and generous perspectives on an earlier iteration of this piece. I am also thankful to Bolesław Błaszczyk, Joanna Helms, Lisa Jakelski, and Lisa Cooper Vest, all of whom have themselves published on PRES, for discussing the studio with me. Izabela Zymer at the Polish Music Information Centre (Warsaw) aided with archival research.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributor
Andrea F. Bohlman is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studies the political stakes of music making and sound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her monograph Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland (Oxford University Press, 2020) grows out of a decade of research on the work of sound and music in the opposition to state socialism in Poland. In 2017, she received the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society for her article ‘Solidarity, Song, and the Sound Document’ (Journal of Musicology, 2016). Further publications grow out of work on sound and music in the context of migration, war, and social movements. She coedited a special issue of Twentieth-Century Music with Peter McMurray devoted to tape and tape recording.
Notes
1 ‘PRES Sample Pack Info’, included with digital download at https://iam.pl/UFJFU19BYmxldG9uX3NhbXBsZV9wYWNr (accessed 1 July 2020).
2 https://soundcloud.com/culturepl/sicher-marcin-staniszewski-this-is-pres (accessed 1 July 2020).
3 Through online installations at MoMA and expansive on-site exhibitions, art historian David Crowley has likewise opened the studio to audiences interested in modernist art and design from Eastern Europe. Throughout this essay I—cognizant of the accessibility imperative of the studio itself—draw upon two collections of essays and translated primary source materials devoted to PRES in English (Crowley Citation2019; Roszkowska and Świątkowska Citation2012).
4 I emphasise reuse here in contrast to the sometimes interchangeable ‘recycle’. In the context of tape, recycling refers to the work of re-recording used tape, deleting old content in the process (Griffin Citation2015, 16). On material waste and historical matter, see Hogan (Citation2015).
5 For example, Lem’s 1951 novel, The Astronauts, begins with the discovery of an undecipherable sound recording. That novel was adapted for film in a Polish-East German co-production, The Silent Star, for which Eugeniusz Rudnik produced extra-terrestrial and astro-technological sound effects within PRES (Heiduschke Citation2013).
6 ‘Studio’, Polska Kronika Filmowa 2/1963. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok6-g_mIstE (accessed 1 July 2020).
7 As a recent example of this historiographic trend, Jennifer Iverson (Citation2019) offers, ‘Without minimising the importance of the intermittent experimentation that took place in East Berlin, Poland, Moscow, and elsewhere, electronic music was neither embraced nor institutionally funded in the Socialist Realist East with the same sustained vigor as in Western Europe’ (8).
8 Joanna Helms (Citation2020) offers a complementary perspective on accessibility and the electronic music studio in her analysis of the people allowed and invited to use the equipment in Milan at RAI (121–62).
9 As examples see Eugeniusz Rudnik, Maszyny, CD Requiem 186 (2019); and Bogusław Schäffer, Monodram, CD Requiem 160 (2019).
10 Reproduced and quoted in David Crowley, 'Spatial Music: Design and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio', Post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art around the Globe (Dec. 2013), https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/335-spatial-music-design-and-the-polish-radio-experimental-studio, accessed 15 June 2019.
11 APPARATUM was also commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. The demonstration video, which formally mimics the documentary short about the Studio produced in its first years, visually highlights tape’s interventions in time with shots of reels as spools and loops. Another explanatory video makes the historical collapse seem imminent, titled ‘What Would Happen If PanGenerator Was in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio?’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Yj0jOj0ts (accessed 1 July 2020).
12 For a case study that attends to the creative tension between these forces in the context of the German Democratic Republic see Gumbert (Citation2014).
13 This phrasing grows from the expansive view the contributors to Piekut Citation2014. In the introduction Piekut asks, among many agitated questions, ‘What could experimentalism be?’ (1).
14 The program and a partial list of participants—including Lutosławski, Górecki, and Penderecki, none of whom would become internationally celebrated for tape composition—is included in Błaszczyk (Citation2019a, 62–65).
15 For an analysis of this history, see Seehaber (Citation2009).
16 Within the programme’s parameters, classical music is specifically labelled ‘Music of Freedom’, and is coupled with jazz as the featured musical styles, see https://iam.pl/en/polska-100-programme-structure
17 Press release for the ‘Sounds from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio Free Pack’, https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/sounds-polish-radio-experimental-studio/ (accessed 1 July 2020).
18 A record of Boulanger’s 1964 visit is held in Folder 16/39, Polish Composers’ Union, Polish Music Information Center, Warsaw, Poland. Personal communication with Michael Ranta, 21 July 2020.
19 Monika Pasiecznik, ‘A History of Electroacoustic Music in Poland from The Perspective of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 1957–1990, http://soundexchange.eu/#anthology_en (accessed 1 July 2020).
20 In a 1999 interview, former director Folkmar Hein credited Patkowski with bringing ‘non-local thinking’ to the West Berlin studio (Palmer Citation2007).
21 See, for example, ‘Music Chronicle/Musik-Chronik’ 3 (4;1968), 45.
22 This reading follows Ignacio Corona and Alejandro L. Madrid’s (Citation2008) theorization of musical mobilities—especially the imbalance between border regulations constraining human mobility and those enabling the circulation of musical commodities.
23 I have not been able to locate his address because of limited archival accessibility in 2020, however Everett Helm's 14 May 1961 review of the International Congress of of Experimental Music in the New York Times suggests that he discussed the ‘functional’ possibility of electronic music made at the radio, especially for the dramatic arts, including ballet and film.
24 This was the case for Bogusław Schaeffer’s Music for Tape (1966/1973) (Błaszczyk Citation2019b, 162).
25 I am thankful to Scott Schwartz for providing access to the material storage conditions of a selection of these reels and for generous consultation about their provenance and maintance during the extended closure of this collection in 2020.
26 My understanding of this historical archive within the broader collection is based on bibliographic work by Rachel Johannigmeier and David Luftig’s finding aid, accessible at https://archon.library.illinois.edu/?p=collections/findingaid&id=11278&q=&rootcontentid=178055#id178055 (accessed 1 July 2020).
27 Quoted in Maya-Roisin Slater, Aaron Coultate, and Carlos Hawthorn. ‘Unsound 2019: Five Key Performances’, https://www.residentadvisor.net/reviews/24348 (accessed 1 July 2020).
28 Polish Radio, having acquired tape copies of the Voice of America Poland broadcasts, has made the archival recording accessible online at https://www.polskieradio.pl/39/156/Artykul/1285332,My-narod-%E2%80%93-historyczne-slowa-Lecha-Walesy-w-amerykanskim-Kongresie (accessed 15 June 2019). On transference, trauma, and memory see LaCapra Citation2018, 32–60.
29 For reference, by the time Wałęsa was speaking in November 1989, the first free elections in Poland (4 June 1989) were already having structural consequences as a coallition government between the Community Party and the party representing the opposition to state socialism, Solidarity.
30 This laundry list appears everywhere the album was promoted, for example for a release party at a House of Culture: https://www.dkkadr.waw.pl/l-u-c-3989-zrozumiec-polske/, accessed 1 July 2020.
31 This is a laudable and science-oriented corrective to public discourses that obscure and even erase the Black cultural crucible for hip hop by locating its origins in hip and anarchic collage—whether in the hands of Pierre Henry or the Beatles. Chris Cutler’s Plunderphonia is a good example of this move.
32 For a summary of the stakes of this debate (and an excellent digest of the specific affordances of digital sampling), see Katz (Citation2006, 147–149).