Experimental Music
Electro Thaw
Musique Concrète
Eugeniusz Rudnik
Ryszard Szeremeta
Elżbieta Sikora
Krzysztof Knittel
Cosmos
The Black Room
Reset
Credits
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The Black Room

What does the Polish Radio Experimental Studio truly mean? An institution, a place, or style of music? From what we know, for the most part it was an instrument designed by architectural genius Oskar Hansen.

Early computers were enormous – having abilities comparable to a calculator, they could take up a whole room. The same goes for the early experimental studios. In order to do simple compositions that now can be completed on a home computer, a lot of equipment was needed – tone generators, square-wave and pulse generators, filters, tape recorders, mixer desks, and more. In theory, most of them weren't meant to be used for musical purposes, and they could hardly be called independent instruments. Does that mean that early electronic music was created without musical instruments? Not necessarily. When engineers and composers combined and used all of the above equipment this resulted in early music synthesizing.

So, how did it all come about? In 1962, after a few years of running Polish Radio Experimental Studio, studio head, Józef Patkowski, ordered the super-synthesizer from architect Oskar Hansen. The Studio's needs played well with the composer's concept of "free form". Hansen designed a whole set of mobile elements that enabled continuous modifications of the super-synthesizer. It was plain on one side (reflecting the sound) and perforated on the other (to absorb the sound). With this, the acoustics of the Black Room – the most essential element of every concert hall – could be adjusted to the needs of every track. Looking at the photos (or the model) today, it is hard to judge how it fulfilled its role. However, it is easy to imagine it being used as the bridge of the first Polish spaceship going on its mission to explore Mars.

Cosmos

"Even today, most listeners connect electronic sounds with green aliens or robots. I fought these associations from the beginning, even though it wasn't easy. […] Besides, Polish Radio Experimental Studio very soon was included in this 'cosmic business' " – complained a few years ago Eugeniusz Rudnik, one of the Studio's most productive composers.

But, could listeners really be blamed for preferring sounds of a pulsar, a meteor shower, or a supernova explosion, to abstract and experimental sounds? You may not have heard Rudnik’s compositions "Lesson" ("Lekcja"), "Collage" ("Kolaż"), or "Mobile", but if you were born in Poland in the second half of the XX century, then it is almost certain that you’ll have watched (and listened to!) films such as "The Silent Star" ("Milcząca Gwiazda"), "Mister Blot's Academy" ("Akademia Pana Kleksa"), or "Inquest of Pilot Pirx" ("Test pilota Pirxa"). The electronic music for those films was created by Polish Radio Experimental Studio, and the last one ("Inquest of Pilot Pirx") was composed by Rudnik himself. It's quite easy to find films about androids, miniature worlds, and alien ships landing at State Collective Farm among his artistic achievements.

It's likely that the way Polish people imagine an alien's voice or the sound of starships in space is mainly Rudnik and his friends' doing. Odds are that you’ve heard sounds created by the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Isn’t that reason enough to be proud of the Studio and its artists?

Musique Concrète

Nowadays, nobody's surprised by the sound of shooting and reloading a gun in "Paper Planes" M.I.A, or the sound that the elephant makes in "Work It" Missy Eliott. If not for the concept of Musique Concrète created in the forties those sounds may never have made their way into today’s popular songs.

Before the concept of Musique Concrète sounds were separated as being for "music" (instruments and singing) and "nonmusic". You didn’t hear music created from the sounds that animals make or those heard when a train passes by. Those sounds have their own rhythm, timbre, and – more or less accurately – pitch. Our brains interpret these sounds as descriptive: "stop, the train is coming", "watch out, the wolf is near" - and not as music. To release sounds from their original meaning is to take them from their original context and into abstract, uncommon configurations. An electronic studio turned out to be a perfect tool for this purpose.

The first European center of experimental music – Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète from Paris – did not create new sounds but created music using the sounds of the surrounding world. The creator of this idea and the studio that came with it – Pierre Schaeffer – called this new form of art musique concrete. He also named the way of listening to "ordinary" sounds outside of their original context as "acousmatic". Those ideas had no less effect on Polish Radio Experimental Studio than the concept of electronic music. There is no shortage of examples among the first tracks produced by Warsaw studio: "Study for one cymbal stroke" ("Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz") by Włodzimierz Kotoński, "Psalmus" by Krzysztof Penderecki (disfigured studio recordings of a choir) or "Lesson" ("Lekcja") by Eugeniusz Rudnik (consisting mostly of recordings taken in school).

Electro Thaw

"Some call it a cacophony of decibels, others prefer to call it a happy song of the future - but that's just how the right to experiment works" – the announcer enthusiastically claimed in a propaganda newsreel from the sixties dedicated to Polish Radio Experimental Studio.

A few years earlier in Poland a Stalinist culture minister upon hearing Witold Lutosławski’s – from today's perspective very classic – I Symphony, stated: "a composer like that should be thrown under a tram". The minister was Włodzimierz Sokorski, who in 1957 – this time as a head of public TV and radio – personally decided to allow the creation of Polish Radio Experimental Studio. What changed in following years that the experiment (not only in the musical sense) stopped being an anti-revolutionary crime and became something to cherish?

Firstly – Stalin died. In many countries of the eastern bloc, this death brought more freedom – in politics, civil rights, and obviously in art. In Poland, this process is known as the Polish October thaw, named after the change of leaders at the ruling party that happened on Oct 21st, 1956. It began the golden era for Polish cinematography, art, and music. Soon people like Niemen, Komeda, or Penderecki would become famous, often internationally. This new cultural policy was supposed to show the Polish People's Republic as a rich, modern, and, above all, free country. And what a better way to represent just that than electronic music, which comes from unrestricted imagination and experimentation, but also very costly and modern equipment? It seems that we owe the most futuristic and cutting-edge institution in Polish music history to the rebranding that Gomułka wanted to give to the somber, poor image Poland had…

Ryszard Szeremeta: the Wonder Child of the Digital Era

Ryszard Szeremeta (born 1952) was one of the last directors and composers of Polish Radio Experimental Studio. He was the one who really opened Polish vanguard music to the pleasures of digital sound.

Today, with the world revelling in the vintage sound of analog studio equipment, Szeremeta stays true to his own digital lineage. "It was really a revolution, and I witnessed it first-hand. During my time at the EMS in Stockholm, all composers there were using enormous, bulky computers. They had to be programmed, which involved a lot of arduous work. One time, a strange young man came over and began to roam the halls, shoeless, observing specialists at work. A few days later, he came back with a synthesizer and plugged it in. As it began to produce sounds, everyone froze. It was the legendary Yamaha DX7, one of the first versions. This digital machine virtually swept the studios across Europe, since it offered markedly more possibilities than the whole intricate equipment still in use in Stockholm. This revolution continues, which I think is great. My only fear is that composers, who now have such readily available and cheap tools at hand, will turn towards instant samples and presets instead of looking for new paths. Personally, I continue to advocate for the digital format: its clarity opens up infinite possibilities scale-wise, while also increasing the range of intervention sound-wise when compared with the analog domain" says Szeremeta.

Elżbieta Sikora: A Woman, Not a Machine

A true heroine of Polish electronic music whose adventure with new sounds started in 1968 in Paris under the wing of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Elżbieta Sikora (born 1943), a sound engineering graduate from Warsaw, was taking her first steps under the watchful eye of Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle. After returning to Poland, she took up regular composition studies. In the Polish composer's œuvre – with all her knowledge and technical mastery – she was not only intoxicated by the technology. What was, and still is, important to her was: meaning, context, and emotions. Her music has a pictorial sensitivity, a saturation with timbre and colour, a search for non-obvious extra-musical associations, and often elaborate storylines (the "Head of Orpheus" cycle). It is a peculiar "sculpture with and in sound", telling of the most recent history as well – such works as "Rhapsody for the Death of the Republic" (utilizing the sound of an atomic bomb explosion) and "Janek Wiśniewski – December – Poland" (a piece written in 1981 upon hearing the news that martial law had been declared in Poland).

Sikora soberly assesses the possibilities of work with electronics: "As an artist-teacher, I have travelled the long road from tape-recorder technology to the newest computer methods. I have always been worried by my students' drive toward more and more efficient machines that would create music for them […]; even experimental composers allow themselves to be dominated by computers. But then the machine must be harnessed and forced to do things that it was not created to do."

Retro-electronics with soul. And a feminine touch par excellence, as in the œuvre of Daphne Oram, a Briton, or – even more so – Suzanne Ciani, an American born the same year as Sikora.

Eugeniusz Rudnik: Hip Hop Country Boy

Creators of hip-hop may be known for their formula of recycling in music, utilizing ready-made sound material – but they weren’t the first. A large part of the œuvre of Eugeniusz Rudnik (1932–2016) from the end of the 1950s was based on the reuse of various types of archival materials to build characteristic text-sound compositions which he called sound shows or sound-words.

"I became possessed by the physicality of the tape; I suddenly held the sound in my hands" – is how Rudnik described his starting point as an artist who (having previously been a soldier and a miner) began as an administrative employee at Polish Radio and went on to become a co-creator of the legendary Polish Radio Experimental Studio. It is here that the self-taught country boy from Nadkole – he completed his degree from Warsaw University of Technology in 1967 after he’d already become an acclaimed producer - introduced his contemporaries, great composers including such luminaries as Krzysztof Penderecki and Arne Nordheim, - to the world of new possibilities brought by technology. It's also where he spent time constructing his own collages – full of emotions and juxtaposing a plane of childlike, down-to-earth naïveté with the brutal plane of history (as in the pioneering "Lesson", 1959–1965), and avant-garde means of expression with an idyllic vision of the countryside (as in his later work "Dzięcielina pałała", 2010). Breaking through the stereotype of cold, inhuman technology seemed to be one of the primary intentions of Rudnik, who on the one hand treated himself as an automaton (he mentioned having been a "tapecutter", having cut up to 15,000 kilometres of tape over his lifetime); on the other, in a documentary film by Zuzanna Solakiewicz entitled "15 Corners of the World", he said, "I wanted to humanize, warm-up, tame those electronics". Through his life story – his continual distance, his simple approach to life (as a country boy, he grew potatoes with a passion) and modesty – he certainly did exactly that.

Krzysztof Knittel: The Guy Is Just Like That

Intuition and improvisation. Keywords to which Krzysztof Knittel – despite changing stylistic languages and compositional methods – remains faithful. Nothing forever, nothing permanent. He is both here and there. The guy is just like that.

Krzysztof Knittel (born 1947) distinguishes several phases in his composer's career, but they result from a desire more to describe than to organize, for with Knittel, the various threads overlap, mix and circle back. Styles, genres, techniques and fascinations move from one to the other. In fact, he began by writing cabaret and poetic songs that brought him his initial popularity. He was attracted by the aesthetics of turpism, the peacefulness of the Far East, jazz, rock, hip-hop, the connections between music and the visual arts, and finally, the total syncretism of artistic activities.

There is, however, something that has run through his œuvre from the very beginning. That is electronics. He ended up at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) in 1973. He also worked at the SUNY Buffalo Computer Studio in 1978. With Knittel, nothing has ever been definitive: ideas that were thrown out ad hoc have unexpectedly turned into long-term projects, while others have died right after the première. He has always had his ears wide open. It will suffice to listen to "norcet" (today, there exist several versions, 1978–80) – a work whose title comprises the first letters of the words: natural-objects-recording-computer-electronics-tape – which defines Knittel as a sonic omnivore, a "hippie electronics engineer". Or, for instance, "leftovers" (1978), a composition realized at PRES, derived from the leftovers from… the achievements of other composers.

Experimental Music

No one is surprised, of course, when experiments are done in the name of science. However, what if we decided to do some experiments in music?

This weird idea was first encountered in Europe and the USA after II World War, and its main propagator was John Cage. This American composer wanted to create new sounds, new music, and a new way to experience music in general. Not an easy task despite all the new instruments and tools provided by the modern era. Next on the list of obstacles are our own minds and habits. To beat them, Cage employed elements of unpredictability into his music. Many others, such as Pierre Schaeffer in France, or Karlhienz Stockhausen in Germany, chose to put most of the effort to the new ways of creating music given to them by electronic studios. Instead of violin or piano, they have used magnetic tapes, electrical circuits and loudspeakers. In the second half of the '50s, artists from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio led by charismatic musicologist Józef Patkowski have followed their footsteps. Among them were: Krzysztof Penderecki, Bogusław Schaeffer and Włodzimierz Kotoński.

So, why did all those experiments happen? Maybe because, similarly to scientists, the composers wanted to gain better understanding of the world around and inside us? To understand the way we experience emotions and hear and perceive the world? Without these kind of experiments we would not have rock'n'roll, techno, or hip-hop. Can you imagine the world without them?

ODGŁOS

odgłos (noun, Polish, IPA: /ˈɔd.ɡwɔs/)
«sound accompanying an activity or produced by something»

by Holy Pangolin

Agata Nawrot
Sebastian Krzyszkowiak

Production:

Jakub Marszałkowski
Vitruvio Foundation

Informational texts:

Bartek Chaciński
Jacek Hawryluk
Michał Mendyk

Translation:

Anna Kwapiszewska

Audio:

All music and sounds created in Polish Radio Experimental Studio by

Krzysztof Knittel
Elżbieta Sikora
Ryszard Szeremeta

SPECIAL THANKS

Handicraft:

Fundacja Pogotowie Społeczne
Aleksandra Nawrot
Leszek Puchalski
Zela Monika Pytko
Zośka Koszałkowska
Lisa Slater

PRES model:

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw

Instruments:

Bartosz Izbicki
Małgorzata Izbicka
Bartosz Żłobiński
Leszek Pelc
Zbigniew Butryn
Hermann Knoch
Béla Szerényi

The first concept of the game was created at the Geek Jam during the Game Industry Conference 2018.

© 2019 Adam Mickiewicz Institute
                Vitruvio Foundation

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Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2022.

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