Popular Polish Electronic Music, 1970–2020

A Cultural History

Ewa Mazierska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429575174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Popular Polish Electronic Music, 1970–2020 offers a cultural history of popular Polish electronic music, from its beginning in the late 1960s/early 1970s up to the present day, in the context of Polish economic, social and political history, and the history of popular music in this country.

From the perspective of production, scene, industry and consumption, the volume considers the issue of access to electronic instruments in the 1970s and 1980s, and the variety of inspirations, such as progressive rock and folk music, that have contributed to the development of Polish electronic music as it is known today. The widespread contribution of Polish electronic music to film is also considered.

This is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers of electronic music, popular music and (Eastern) European music and culture.

1 The 1970s
The beginnings

It is difficult to assess when popular electronic music started to be produced in Poland, in part due to the blurred boundary between electronic and non-electronic music, as well as between popular and serious/academic music. However, I do not intend to offer here a precise date, but rather to delineate a longer period when it was established as a separate phenomenon. I argue that this happened in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Several milestones should be listed here: the first pop-rock concerts where electronic instruments were given prominence; the production of the first electronic records in Poland; the construction of the first Polish electronic musical instrument used in professional settings; the first use of popular electronic music in film; the opening of first Polish discotheques; and, finally, the coining of the term ‘el-muzyka’ (also written ‘elmuzyka’), which was meant to capture the specificity of the Polish version of electronic music. The purpose of this chapter is also to present the circumstances in which this music was born and the context in which it was consumed.

Poland in the 1970s

One can list various factors conducive to the birth of Polish popular electronic music, with some being regional and local and others international or global. Let’s begin with the former, namely the political, economic and political situation Poland found itself in the 1970s. This decade symbolically began in Poland on 20 December 1970, when Moscow agreed to the dismissal of the then First Secretary of the Polish United Workers Party (the PZPR), Władysław Gomułka, and replacing him with Edward Gierek as the new First Secretary. This change at the top of the Party followed a bloody response by the Polish authorities to strikes on the Baltic Coast, caused by the threat of price rises. Appointing Gierek was meant to prevent destabilisation of the entire country. Gierek averted the danger of a general strike by directly appealing to the workers of Szczecin and Gdańsk, promising them economic reform and improvement in living standards (Lukowski and Zawadzki 2001: 267).

As Adam Bromke observes, ‘Gierek adopted a new political style which emphasized greater respect on the part of the communist authorities for citizens’ rights and a readiness to enter into dialogue with the Polish people’ (Bromke 1981: 6); this being in part a consequence of the Helsinki accord, signed in 1975, which required the countries of state socialism to respect human rights (Berend 1996: 233–6). Gierek was also media-friendly and especially recognised the power of television in creating a positive image of the rulers (Cieśliński 2006: 115–36). The new First Secretary also had a more Western outlook than his predecessors, no doubt resulting from living in Belgium. His government eased foreign currency restrictions, giving many Poles access to otherwise rare Western consumer goods. In the 1970s a network of shops, named Pewex, was opened, where Poles could buy shortage goods with Western currency, and a network of shops where Poles could sell Western goods, known as komisy (from commission, paid to the shops), had greatly expanded. Setting up Pewexes was a sign of recognising the high value of Western money on the black market but also a means of dividing Poles into those with access to this scarce good (or just the wealthier) and the rest. Restriction of travel was eased too, with the tacit hope that Poles (not unlike Yugoslavs in the 1960s) would bring home from abroad their hard-earned savings, to plug gaps in the national economy.

Gierek’s economic policy emphasised improving the standard of living. To address the problem of Poland’s technological backwardness, the government bought many licenses from the West, including for car production and components for building apartments in multi-storey blocks. In this decade there was also significant growth in private entrepreneurship, epitomised by private shops (sklepy ajencyjne) (Koryś 2007: 452). In the first half of the 1970s, individual consumption increased by 50% and individual income by 59% (Mazurek 2012: 299). The new regime also introduced free Saturdays, beginning in 1972 with two Saturdays per year and finishing with three per month. These improvements were possible because Gierek took advantage of the relatively cheap foreign credit, available in the early 1970s. For Poland (and some other Eastern European countries, such as Hungary) this flood of dollars, which poured in from multi-billionaire OPEC states, distributed by the international banking system, seemed a providential way of simultaneously paying for investment and raising their people’s ‘standard of living’ (Hobsbawm 1995: 474). The negative result was a high level of indebtness to the West. However, it was not so much debt per se which was a problem, as the fact that during the 1970s Poland, in common with the socialist East at large, increased its economic and technological distance from the West, which at the time experienced a new wave of modernisation, re-directing its economy to new industries, most importantly electronics (Berend 1996: 238–9). Poland also attempted to move in this direction, as testified by buying licenses to produce sophisticated commodities, but the speed of modernisation was slow, the ‘technological revolution’ was poorly coordinated and the drive to move towards information technology and postindustrial society clashed with the drive to do things ‘the old way’. This rendered the products of Polish industry unattractive to Western buyers, making the servicing of debt a heavy burden for the country. 1970s Polish Westernisation was thus practically limited to emulating Western lifestyles without imitating its economic structure. To signal that the new political regime was modern and pragmatic, the word ‘socialism’ was frequently preceded by ‘real’ or ‘actually existing’. There was a tacit agreement between the citizens and the state – the state promised to leave the citizens in peace for accepting the status quo. This agreement worked as long as the economic situation was advantageous. This was the case until the mid-1970s. In the second half of the decade, due to a combination of factors, such as a global economic crisis, bad weather affecting Polish crops and the failure of Gierek’s strategy of ‘catching up with the West’ coming home to roost, resulted in a deep economic crisis, reflected in long queues for food and lower living standards, particularly for industrial workers. Inevitably, this led to widespread discontent, resulting in a series of strikes in Radom and Ursus in 1976 and in 1980 on the Baltic Coast, which led to the overthrow of Gierek’s regime. This moment marks the symbolic end of the 1970s in Poland.

New directions in popular music

In 1977 British television broadcast All You Need Is Love: The Story of Popular Music, a monumental series directed by British filmmaker Tony Palmer, specialised in documentaries about popular and serious music. On this occasion Palmer’s ambition was, as the subtitle states, to present the history of popular music in its different genres and dimensions. I do not intend to summarise here its content but make some comments about its final episode, titled ‘Imagine: New Directions’. This episode lasts about 50 minutes and presents, in a mixture typical for documentary cinema, performances, interviews and images of places where important music events occurred. What is most important from my perspective, is that most of this episode is devoted to electronic music in its different incarnations and functions. One of them is Muzak Corporation, whose executive explains the principles of producing music for stimulation, principally in the workplace. The approach here is that music can be programmed to serve specific purposes, and the development of machines will ensure that this programming will get better. The second type of music of the future is represented by Tangerine Dream, one of the main representatives of krautrock. Their inclusion in this episode can be interpreted as Palmer’s recognition of the contribution of music created ‘on the continent’ to popular music’s future. We see members of the band surrounded by electronic equipment and the place where they are playing: Coventry Cathedral. This episode suggests that the growth of electronic music is breaking the boundary between serious and popular music and also the drive towards producing what Brian Eno described as ‘ambient music’: music which not only produces pleasurable sensations but fills the space, creating acoustic spaces or soundscapes (Eno 2004b: 95). However, most of this episode is devoted to Mike Oldfield, who comes across as both a creator of a new type of popular music and a new type of musician. Palmer presents Oldfield as a kind of genius, whose power lies in transforming crude sounds of acoustic instruments into more sophisticated sounds and juxtaposing, mixing them, so that they create a completely new quality. Oldfield also confesses that he regards rock posturing, consisting of ‘making an exhibition of yourself’, as he puts it, as archaic and silly. He prefers to sit in the studio and make music there, be a studio musician, as described by Eno (2004a).

In hindsight, Palmer’s choice of Tangerine Dream and Oldfield might be regarded as problematic, as the reviewers of the series pointed out (Long and Wall 2013: 26). Kraftwerk proved to be a more enduring and influential act than Tangerine Dream, and Brian Eno and Jean-Michel Jarre represent better the idea of a studio musician than Oldfield, who in due course became regarded as unashamedly commercial and failed to withstand the passage of time. However, it is not the choice of names which matters most, but Palmer’s ability to capture the specificities of electronic music. One of them is its potential to act as ‘useful music’, enjoyed not for its intrinsic beauty but as background to something else. The second characteristic is its ‘three-dimensionality’, best appreciated in places such as large churches, suited for carrying sound far away. The third specificity is the primacy of the studio and the privileging of a producer as the most important creator of music.

In subsequent parts of this chapter I will argue that, despite Polish electronic musicians lagging behind their Western counterparts, they kept up with what the British filmmaker-historian saw as the future of popular music, because they recognised the potential of electronic music as useful music, as a tool of creating soundscapes and they shed the rocker personas to become studio musicians.

Of course, Palmer would not herald electronic music as the future of popular music, if not for some technological developments preceding or coinciding with the production of his documentary. Although electronic instruments were produced as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, in the 1970s and 1980s these instruments evolved from ‘large, expensive, institutional systems to small, relatively inexpensive, personal systems’ (Chadabe 1997: x; Emmerson 2007: xiv–xv; Collins et al. 2013: 76–7). The 1970s was a decade of analogue synthesisers. These new instruments were easier to use both in the studio and during performances, with the Minimoog, which was first released in 1971, proving the greatest hit, commercially and artistically. Its importance lay in facilitating the entrance of electronic instruments into popular music. Before the Minimoog, as its creator, Robert Moog, states in the documentary Moog (2004), directed by Hans Fjellestad, these instruments were used to produce sounds: either in experimental productions or in commercials. For this reason, it did not matter if the electronic instrument was well tuned or not. Minimoog, however, opened the potential to create melodies and this potential was seized on by producers of popular music, most importantly progressive rock, represented by bands such as Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and Jethro Tull. They incorporated electronic instruments more widely than their predecessors and moved away from short songs into longer compositions, even as long as 20 minutes, with extended passages of instrumental music. This type of music was meant to bridge the gap between popular and serious or classical music by creating concert-hall rock (even if performed in stadiums and arenas) (Covach 1997: 3; Théberge 2001: 16), a goal which from the 1970s informed the production of some Polish rockers, especially Czesław Niemen. Such a character of popular electronic music in the 1970s reflected the fact that the Minimoog was furnished with a keyboard – a feature which was not obvious to its constructors. The keyboard suggested certain uses of the machine, most importantly treating it like a piano – hence the temptation on the part of progressive rockers to emulate great composers of piano music, such as Bach.

However, not all electronic musicians of the 1970s ‘went Bach’ with the Minimoog. Kraftwerk, who proved more trailblazers in electronic music than prog rock bands, in their record Autobahn and particularly the titular track, tried to capture the experience of driving on the motorway: passing cars, moving at high speed and the monotony of a long journey.

The beginning of the beginnings

All the factors affecting the mainstreaming of electronic music also affected nascent popular electronic music in Poland, but probably the most important factor was the greater ease of travel, to work abroad and bring back to the country consumer goods and the tools of production of music. Almost all leading producers of electronic music in this period brought their first Hammond organs and synthesisers from abroad, typically West Germany or the United States, or they bought it in Poland in a komis. In the 1950s and the 1960s, when the borders with the West were less porous, this would be extremely difficult. Another factor was a desire to catch up with the West, but not merely by proving that the state socialist system is superior to capitalism, but by developing modern technologies. This explains a certain technophilia of this period, which was reflected in Poland’s drive to produce electronic equipment, including for composing and playing music, and adding a futuristic aura to Polish industrial might by, amongst other things, using electronic music in its media presentation.

The first Polish professional electronic instruments were organs, produced in the Eltra factory in Bydgoszcz, which from 1973 was part of the Unitra industrial complex (Piłaciński 2016). This transistor organ, designed by Polish engineer Wiesław Bruliński, entered the Polish market in the mid-1970s in three types, B1, B2 and Żaczek (a version for children or inexperienced players). They were modernised throughout the rest of the decade and into the 1980s. Its model B 11, produced in 1978, proved the most popular. Authors of the few articles devoted to this invention are critical not so much of the organs themselves but of the very idea of producing them. Przemysław Piłaciński claims that to be regarded as a modern instrument, these organs had to be produced ten years previously. Polish backwardness in this respect was reflected in embarking on producing transistor organs rather than a newer type of electronic equipment (ibid.: 324). Its quality also left much to be desired. Tomasz Wróblewski, a musician and journalist, wrote in 2015 with sarcasm, tinted by nostalgia, that the B 11 model had a specific plastic cover and zips, ‘whose only function seemed to be to malfunction’ (Wróblewski 2015). Thus, the Polish transistor organs testify to the aspiration of the Polish authorities and Polish society to catch up with the West by making inroads into the production of the most advanced technological equipment but not being able to do so due to not thinking ahead. The low quality as much as the relatively low price were the reasons that the Unitra organs were not used during rock concerts and used only during low-brow ‘useful’ events, such as weddings, where music was an accompaniment to other attractions, as opposed to being the main focus of attention. Many culture houses (domy kultury) bought these instruments so they could be used by different musicians rather than being specially transported for the occasion. By the same token, the Unitra organs weren’t furnished with the same level of individuality as the equipment brought from the West which, even if mass produced, became individualised on the way to Poland due to being transported individually and its high cost for the buyer.

Another effect of Gierek’s policies, at least during the first half of his rule, when the economic situation was advantageous, was a depoliticisation or neutering of Polish rock. Admittedly, in the 1960s Polish rock was not particularly political. The most popular bands of this period...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: mapping popular electronic music in Poland
• 1 The 1970s: the beginnings
• 2 The 1980s: polish popular music goes electronic
• 3 Breaking the Iron Curtain
• 4 After 2000: the age of abundance and confusion
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index