Polish Radio Experimental Studio (1957)
Synthesizers
In the Warsaw studio the composer never touched the tape machines: he brought the idea, and a staff engineer cut and spliced the tape. Penderecki, for one, was wary of the high voltage and left almost all the work on Psalmus at the console. The studio spent the next thirty years answering the question of who the author was.
Full text
The Warsaw studio was paid for by Włodzimierz Sokorski — a former minister of culture who had lately been enforcing socialist realism and now chaired the Committee for Radio. He funded a young musicologist, Józef Patkowski, on trips to Milan, Cologne, Paris and Gravesano, and in November 1957 Patkowski took charge of a new department at Polish Radio. On paper it was to produce sound for radio plays and films. In practice Patkowski brought back both schools at once: Warsaw did not choose between the French musique concrète and the German Elektronische Musik. The studio was founded in 1957, a year before the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Assembling the equipment took a year, and the first composers were admitted in mid-1958.
The first autonomous piece came in 1959. Włodzimierz Kotoński, then attending the Darmstadt courses, recorded a single stroke with a soft mallet on an orchestral cymbal, split it with a filter into six bands, transposed it to eleven pitches and, by serial rules, assembled two and a half minutes of music from it. The Study on One Cymbal Stroke took 141 working hours, and for every one of them the engineer Eugeniusz Rudnik sat at the console. This set the studio's division of labour: the composer conceived, the engineer cut and spliced. In 1961 Krzysztof Penderecki, working on Psalmus, was wary of the high voltage in the tape machines and left almost all of the realisation to Rudnik — together they took apart and reassembled the voice of soprano Halina Łukomska by trial and error. In the early 1960s the architects Oskar and Zofia Hansen rebuilt the premises as the "Black Room": six metres by six, with rotating black-and-red panels that reflected sound on their smooth side and absorbed it on the perforated one.
The division of labour produced a result nobody had planned. Rudnik, an electronics engineer with no musical training, began composing on his own — out of what was left on the control-room floor: tape offcuts, announcers' slips, the hum of the valve Telefunken console. He conceived Kolaż (1965) and Dixi (1967) as an answer to German Elektronische Musik, and Vox Humana (1968) became the first Polish quadraphonic composition. The studio's second engineer, Bohdan Mazurek, realised in the mid-1960s the Symfonia of Bogusław Schaeffer — the Warsaw namesake of the Parisian Schaeffer. The score consisted of abstract figures, the preface explained them only loosely, and the single recorded version out of countless possible ones was to a large degree Mazurek's composition. Foreign visitors worked the same way: from 1966 Arne Nordheim assembled Warszawa, Solitaire and Pace with Rudnik. In all, 93 composers passed through the Black Room, a third of them from abroad, and around three hundred autonomous works.
A Moog arrived in 1970, a Synthi AKS in 1973; according to the studio's historian, this was the only moment when its equipment matched the world standard. From then on the studio only fell behind. Martial law in 1981 suspended its work, in 1985 Patkowski was removed from his post, and the equipment was dispersed among departments and partly destroyed. The studio closed in 2004. Rudnik outlived it by twelve years and worked to the end as he had in 1959 — with tape and scissors, without a computer.
Sources
- Pasiecznik, Monika (2012). A History of Electroacoustic Music in Poland from the Perspective of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio 1957–1990 — Sound Exchange: Experimental Music Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 1950–2010 (eds. Seiffarth, Stabenow, Föllmer), Pfau, Saarbrücken, pp. 378–384
- Kowalska-Elkader, Natalia (2023). Polish Radio Art: The Case of Eugeniusz Rudnik and the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, 1959–2002 — Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 43 (3), pp. 810–832
- Moskalewicz, Magdalena; Muzyczuk, Daniel (2013). Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look — post: notes on art in a global context, MoMA, with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź
- Schrader, Barry (1982). Introduction to Electro-Acoustic Music — Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ