polish radio experimental studio

Sounds from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio

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At the end of World War II, the formerly independent country of Poland found itself firmly within the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Despite brief periods of liberalisation, the next 40 years under communism were an era of political and economic repression that only came to an end in 1989 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc of allied socialist states. For many Polish artists and musicians of the period, censorship was a constant concern and repercussions could be harsh for creating work that was deemed to be decadent, anti-Soviet, bourgeois or simply not compatible with the state-sanctioned aesthetic of ‘socialist realism’.

It is therefore surprising to learn that despite the circumstances, one of the first institutions in Europe dedicated to experimental and electronic music was actually founded in Poland. Set up in 1957 to create musical 'illustrations' for movies, radio and television, Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) was an island of artistic freedom throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. As one of the few studios in Eastern Europe with electronic music equipment, and crucially, engineers who could service it, the PRES was a center of research into the possibilities of tape music and saw the creation of many astonishing original electro-acoustic works.

Polish Radio Experimental Studio – equipped for tape music experimentation

While some of the studio’s Western counterparts (the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center , the San Francisco Tape Music Center , GRM in Paris, the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne) were respected cultural institutions in their day (and have since taken on near-mythic status), the output of PRES remains underrepresented in the history of 20th century music. Now, in an effort to make the story of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio more widely known, the country’s cultural institute, Instytut Adama Mickiewicza (IAM), has commissioned a sample library to be produced from some of the works made at the studio by composers Krzysztof Knittel, Elżbieta Sikora and Ryszard Szeremeta in the 1970s and 80s.

We’re thrilled to share this special free collection of sounds and devices with you. This includes nearly 300 sounds, loops and effects organized into Drum Racks, with custom designed Effect Racks and carefully chosen Macro Controls. Download the Pack below and read our interviews with project coordinator Michal Mendyk and Ableton Certified Trainer Marcin Staniszewski, who assembled the Pack.

Download free Sounds from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio 

Please note: Live 10 Suite is required to make full use of the devices included in this download

Adam Mickiewicz Institute gives general authorization to anyone who would like to use the samples in any manner, including their unlimited processing or adaptation

Interview with project coordinator Michal Mendyk

Can you briefly sketch the origins of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio?

Polish Radio Experimental Studio was one of the first electronic music centre in Europe, founded in 1957 in Warsaw as a department of state Polish Radio. The founder of the Studio was Józef Patkowski, a musicologist and expert in early electronic music. What’s interesting is that Patkowski was strongly supported by Włodzimierz Sokorski, a radical Marxist, chief of Polish Radio and former minister of culture of People’s Republic of Poland. Paradoxically, a couple of years earlier, it was Sokorski who introduced social realism and radical political and aesthetical censorship in Polish art and culture. He was famous for having said about Witold Lutosławski, one of the leaders of Polish music vanguard that “he should be thrown under a tram”. So, in 1957 the same guy was responsible for creating the most experimental music centre in the whole Eastern Europe!  He later said that Polish Radio Experimental Studio was his way to redeem his previous sins. This is one of many example of how paradoxical cultural and intellectual life in an authoritarian system can be.

Uncovering the Soul of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. English subtitles available.

Along with the Experimental Studio of Slovak Radio in Bratislava , the PRES was one of the only official institutions where electronic music was produced in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. Were the activities of the PRES ever overtly politicized, either positively as evidence of the “progressive” nature of socialism, or negatively as an example of “bourgeois” cultural activities that should be suppressed?

The situation of Polish culture was very special in the Eastern Bloc. After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the change of government in Poland in 1956, there was a strong tendency towards liberalisation in social life – what was known then as “The Thaw”. Although in many disciplines this tendency was later reversed, it did not change in art and culture. Of course there was a strictly political censorship, but almost no aesthetical one. Actually progressive, even avant-garde artists were strongly supported by the government as a part of official propaganda that was trying to say “We are socialist and at the same time we are progressive and liberal”.

Thanks to this paradox, the international careers of such figures as film director Andrzej Wajda, composer Krzysztof Penderecki or theatre director Jerzy Grotowski became possible. This was not the case in any other Eastern Bloc country where artistic experiments were restricted, if not strictly prohibited. For example, the Experimental Studio of Slovak Radio, created in 1965, regularly faced problems from the side and produced only a couple of dozen works.

At the same time, Polish Radio Experimental Studio produced over 300 hundred autonomous works and even more soundtracks for radio, film and TV. It also regularly hosted both young and renowned composers from the West, including Arne Nordheim from Norway, Lejaren Hiller from USA, François-Bernard Mâche from France or Franco Evangelisti from Italy. On the other hand the Studio was a part of socialist system. Therefore, although in practice it concentrated on autonomous experimental works, officially it’s main task was to create incidental music for radio, TV and film. So again, there emerged interesting paradoxes. For example the same composer could create experimental work with hidden anti-government message one day and on the next he was hired to produce the soundtrack for a pure propaganda film.

Eugeniusz Rudnik, a pioneer of electronic music in Poland, working at PRES

Unlike figures such as Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Henry or Luc Ferrari at GRM in Paris or Karlheinz Stockhausen at Studio für Elektronische Musik in Cologne, the composers working in the field of electro-acoustic music at PRES remain fairly unknown. What do you think explains this? Was it just a matter of Poland being outside of the European/American record industry? Or was the music or the composers’ activities somehow suppressed?

One important reason is of course that Polish Radio Experimental Studio was neither as advanced nor as productive as GRM in Paris or WDR studio in Cologne. This is a fact. On the other hand, in so called contemporary “serious” music there are still very strong “national centers” in Germany, France and America that largely focussed on what happens in their own milieu, without deeper interest in the peripheries.

Secondly, PRES did not have important achievements in the digital domain, in a way it has remained a purely analogue phenomenon. Its “golden era” was in the 1970s, more than 40 years ago. Many of the best works have been forgotten, especially because in the last quarter of the 20th century in Polish and Eastern European “serious” music has been dominated by conservative, neoclassical and neo-romantic tendencies. From this point of view experimental works were considered nonsense.

Also, after the fall of the iron curtain, artistic circles in many Eastern European countries became extremely interested in exchange with Western cultural circles, and very often undervalued their own tradition. It's only now, after almost 30 years, that this tendency has changed. Experimental music is a special case, I believe – in the post-techno era, there seems to be a global tendency of searching for the analogue roots of our contemporary digital sound.

Tape machine, mixer, filter banks, oscillators, chalkboard, giant ashtray – the classic 70s electronic music studio set-up at PRES.

And how did you come to the idea to use the recordings from the PRES archive to make a shareable sample library?

I could just say that creating samples is nowadays the simplest way to give archival recordings a second life. But I also strongly believe that Polish Radio Experimental Studio archives really fit contemporary music production practises. Actually, many PRES composers worked in a way that is more similar to contemporary music producers than to “serious” experimental music music composers from Germany of France. The latter were deeply involved in sophisticated artistic theories or advanced technological experiments. Most of PRES composers on the other hand, were as involved in experimental music as in incidental music and these two fields often mixed in very interesting way, making their film music more “experimental” and their experimental music – more emotional, sensual and accessible. On a technical level this means: the practise of sampling their own or other composers’ works, as well as popular songs; reusing the same material in different compositions in a “remix-like” manner, adding regular rhythmic pulses to experimental sounds and textures, etc.

Produced at PRES: Józef Robakowski’s 1971 piece “Prostokąt dynamiczny”

Produced at PRES: Bohdan Mazurek - “Daisy Story”

Interview with sound designer Marcin Staniszewski

You are an Ableton Certified Trainer , a musician, a producer and you work as a sound designer for apps, film and television. How did you find the experience of digging through the archives of your own country’s experimental music?

It was an ear opening experience. I was aware of Polish Radio Experimental Studio and most of the notable composers that were active during its existence but I was astonished by the quality of sounds, and the unique timbres and textures they achieved with such limited tools compared to current technology. It's just mind boggling. The coolest thing for me was that most of that music is not super tight in terms of certain BPM or grid. It’s usually improvised and very alive, evolving all the time.

Digitized stereo tape mixdowns served as source material for the free Pack

What was the state of the materials you were given access to and how did you go about organising it?

I received digitized source material. Most of the material was recorded to tape, by professional engineers, and you can definitely hear that. I was given access to stereo mixes, so I had to be creative because it was often a challenge to find the right moments to cut the samples. As I was digging thru the material, the majority of the samples fell naturally into one of three categories - it was either some percussive sounds, sound effects or rhythmical loops, so I did not have to think too much about it.

How / why did you decide to put the material into Racks and Audio Loops?

I decided to use Drum Racks as to me they are the essence of Live – the most creative and, at the same time, simplest tool. There are just endless possibilities with all the chains, grouping and macros. It’s also a very clear structure, so it was also very natural for me to put the samples in Drum Racks. As for loops, I didn’t really care if they are looping in a conventional regular manner. I was only looking for a grooves, and the weirder, the better. I mean I had access to some eccentric, crazy stuff, so I had to explore that side of it. I just wanted to be sure that it loops seamlessly. Don't ask me about the tempo or time signatures though!

One of PRES’s tape loop machines

What surprised you most during your work?

I discovered that compressors are one of the most overrated tools nowadays. All these compositions are very dynamic, to such an extent, that even a simple white noise burst was giving me goosebumps. There are some soft passages followed by noise explosions and such things create another level of tension. This dynamic dimension is lost nowadays and it’s a shame because it can be so powerful. No wonder why some old school engineers use compression so lightly.

Also, as I was working on the tune showcasing this library (I liked the idea so much that I started a new solo project called SICHER and you can expect at least an EP very soon), I was amazed by how much one can squeeze out of one loop or one sample. It’s so much fun and so much more coherent when you use just three or four samples and then mangle them to death instead of using 100 different samples from all over the place. You can be sure that they share a common "timbre signature" and its not limiting at all. I found that I can make a whole drum kit out of one simple sound! It's just the matter of super simple operations like adjusting the start/end point of sample, or pitching it up and down. You want a clicky kick drum? Just move the damn start point so it does not fire off at the zero crossing and you got a nice click that will cut through the mix.

The composers

Krzysztof Knittel – “Study Nr. 1”

Krzysztof Knittel is a sound engineer, composer, performer, music journalist, social activist associated with the independent culture community during the martial law years, academic organizer and lecturer. Knittel has worked with a variety of styles, genres and techniques but one constant among all them has been his interest in electronics, which brought him to the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in 1973.

Elzbieta Sikora – “Voyage II”

Elżbieta Sikora began her career studying under Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle, two key members of Groupe de Recherches Musicales. She has been associated with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio since the 1970s. After relocating to Paris in 1981, she has worked at a number of renowned electronic music studios and composed orchestral works and operas, many of which show strong traces of electronic narrative.

Ryszard Szeremeta - “Pulse Rate”

Ryszard Szeremeta  is a composer, conductor, and long-time head of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. He also produces records, concerts, and electro-acoustic music performances, and was a member of the semi legendary Polish jazz quartet Novi Singers .

Download free Sounds from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio

Please note: Live 10 Suite is required to make full use the devices included in this download

Adam Mickiewicz Institute gives general authorization to anyone who would like to use the samples in any manner, including their unlimited processing or adaptation.

Learn more about Polish Radio Experimental Studio .

Follow Marcin Staniszewski on his website and download the full Live Set of his track “This Is P R E S” , which uses mostly sounds from the P R E S Pack.

Photos by Andrzej Zborski, 1962–1972, Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

The project is co-organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute as part of POLSKA 100, the international cultural programme accompanying the centenary of Poland regaining independence.

Financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland as part of the multi-annual programme NIEPODLEGŁA 2017–2021.

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Polish Radio Experimental Studio

Polish Radio Experimental Studio at Warszawa was founded in October 1957 by Józef Patkowski who conducted the Studio until 1985.

• 2 Literature

Thanks to state-of-the-art technology and two qualified, experienced engineers, the Studio could meet the needs of composers representing various backgrounds, encouraging research into tape music in particular. Nevertheless, the Studio was not devoted exclusively to producing independent electroacoustic pieces, but was also used to create musical »illustrations« for movies, radio and television. In fact, creating incidental music, as well as what today we would call sound designing for various media, was officially one of the Studio’s main tasks. More then 200 autonomous compositions produced. Several hundreds titles for film, theatre, TV, radio and various exhibitions came out from the Studio.

The Studio was a space for meetings between engineers, such as Eugeniusz Rudnik , Bohdan Mazurek, Barbara Okoń-Makowska , Wojciech Makowski, Ewa Guziołek-Tubelewicz , Tadeusz Sudnik, Krzysztof Szlifirski and the composers. Among the members of the latter we should note: Włodzimierz Kotoński , Krzysztof Penderecki , Bogusław Schaeffer , Elżbieta Sikora , Krzysztof Knittel, Hugh Davies, Arne Nordheim , Kare Kolberg, Lejaren Hiller , Roland Kayn and Dubravko Detoni .

Subsequently, the Studio was expected to develop into an interdisciplinary institute of new media. The members of the PRES continually attempted to spread and promote new forms of music, organizing lectures, producing series of radio broadcasts and publishing papers on the subject. It became a laboratory also for visual artists and designers such as Oskar and Zofia Hansen]], Krzysztof Wodiczko , Kazimierz Urbański and Józef Robakowski . [1]

Events [ edit ]

• PRES Revisited: Lecture/ Presentation/ Concerts , NK , Berlin, 13 Dec 2011.
• PRES: the Conference , Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, 13-14 Oct 2017. [2]
• Through the Soundproof Curtain. The Polish Radio Experimental Studio , ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 14 Jul 2018 – 06 Jan 2019. [3]

Literature [ edit ]

• Monika Pasiecznik, "A History of Electroacoustic Music in Poland from the Perspective of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio 1957-1990" , in Anthology of Experimental Music Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 1950-2010 , eds. Carsten Seiffarth, Carsten Stabenow, and Golo Föllmer, Saarbrücken: PFAU, 2012. (English) / (German) / (Polish)
• Studio eksperyment: Leksykon. Zbiór tekstów , Warsaw: The Bęc Zmiana Foundation, 2012. (Polish) [4] [5] (English texts)
• Magdalena Moskalewicz, Daniel Muzyczuk (eds.), "Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look" , post , New York: MoMA, Dec 2013. Special section. (English)
• Ultra Sounds: The Sonic Art of Polish Radio Experimental Studio , ed. David Crowley, Heidelberg: Kehrer, and Karlsruhe: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2019, 336 pp. Publisher . Publisher . [6] [7] . Reviews: Christoffel (Critique d'art), Abushenko (MEDIENwissenschaft). (English)

See also [ edit ]

• Poland#Electroacoustic music

Links [ edit ]

• Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia (WFDiF) , video, fragment, 1 min.
• https://post.moma.org/polish-radio-experimental-studio-a-galaxy-of-writings-prints-and-sound/
• https://post.moma.org/magnetic-tape-as-instrument-a-rare-selection-of-electroacoustic-music-from-poland/
• Electroacoustic music

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A Revolution In Sound: Inside The Polish Radio Experimental Studio

In an exclusive extract from the new book, Ultra Sounds. The Sonic Art of Polish Radio Experimental Studio, David Crowley introduces the trailblazing electronic workshop’s place at the forefront of the Scientific-Technological Revolution

Bolesław Schaeffer’s graphic score for PR-I VIII, 1972. Collection of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łodź.

In 1963 a film crew arrived at the headquarters of Polish Radio in Warsaw to record a newsreel, a staple feature of cinema programmes at the time. The day-to-day activities of a radio station would hardly seem sufficiently newsworthy to warrant special attention. What had drawn the team to Malczewski Street were the facilities of Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES), a specialist recording unit that had been established by composer and musicologist Józef Patkowski six years earlier. They had built the studio to give composers access to recording facilities as well as to the electronic equipment and the expertise required to compose electronic and electroacoustic music. Entirely new timbral colours and sonic textures could be created and combined in situ by a composer without the need for musical instruments, musicians or the conventional tools of composition such as notation. In the absence of familiar signs of musical creativity, the crew trained their cameras on the ranks of dials and switches, and the spinning reels of the studio’s tape recorders. Two engineers – Eugeniusz Rudnik and Bohdan Mazurek – were recorded checking the instruments, making precise timings with a stopwatch and splicing ribbons of tape.

The newsreel was completed with a narrator explaining the work of the studio over a soundtrack of electronic music:

Sound and static generators, filters and modulators. This is the set of instruments operated by Józef Patkowski and his colleagues at Polish Radio Experimental Studio. This is where the boldest ideas of the creators of concrete music come true. Right now, we can hear one the recording … Stereophonic tape recorders and clips of tape used for sound illustration for radio, film and television. Some call it a cacophony of decibels. Others, a joyful song of the future. But that is what the right to experiment is about.

Perhaps anticipating the likely disdain of Polish cinema audiences for the strange and sometimes dolorous music, the narrator seems to answer the question: what is the point of this specialist recording studio? The report’s sign off – ‘the right to experiment’ – was a striking justification for PRES and its products, especially when the work of all creative artists in the People’s Republic of Poland, including composers, had been measured in terms of ideological commitment in the years before the studio had opened its doors.

In the late 1940s, Polish composers – like all creative artists who found themselves in the newly formed Eastern Bloc – had been put under considerable pressure to follow Soviet direction. All public forms of musical expression – commissions, concerts, broadcasts and recordings – were expected to serve the project of ‘building socialism’ by conforming to the official doctrine of Socialist Realism. In 1948 Zofia Lissa – a prominent musicologist – who was to play a part in the development of PRES signed Polish music up to the Soviet programme at the Second International Congress of Composers and Musicologists in Prague in 1948. Beata Bolesławska writes: ‘she thus condemned her Polish colleagues to aesthetic assessment according to the following four aims: avoidance of subjectivism; cultivation of national character in music; adoption of well-known forms; and increased involvement by composers and musicologists on music education’. What particular forms of musical expression would best satisfy Lissa and the new gatekeepers of culture was never precisely outlined. Nevertheless, it was clear that atonality, serialism or other modernist innovations were now viewed as offences against socialism, demonstrating ‘contempt’ for the working classes. Composers who broke with harmonic or melodic conventions or who simply eschewed easy comprehension were accused of formalism and elitism and often publicly admonished, sometimes in the most hysterical terms. Those who drew the strongest criticism had their membership of professional associations withdrawn, effectively ending all opportunities to have their work broadcast or performed in public. Others were bullied into conformity.

Elżbieta Sikora at PRES

Ten years later, the first composition created at PRES – Włodzimierz Kotoński’s Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz ( Study for One Cymbal Stroke , 1959) – rang the dramatic changes that had occurred in the People’s Republic. A single strike of a cymbal was recorded on magnetic tape and then transformed using the studio’s filters. Kotoński described his exacting treatment of this sound source:

In contrast with the vast majority of the earlier works of concrete music, the material was treated in a strict manner derived from the serial electronic compositions. The sound of the cymbal was filtered on five bands of differing widths and transposed on eleven pitches, in accordance with the adopted scale. A specific time scale of eleven durations and six articulation methods was created based on the ratio of the sound duration to the pause that followed within the sound’s time unit; a corresponding dynamic scale of eleven degrees and six forms of envelopes (three attacks and three releases). The entire work was composed in accordance with the principles of total serialisation.

There was little in Kotoński’s method – or in the piece itself – which could be described as ideological work.

Kotoński’s composition was the first in what was to be a remarkable line of musical productions. Patkowski imagined PRES as a kind of laboratory where a composer, working closely with a skilled engineer, could manipulate sounds materially (by editing and joining tape) and electronically (using oscillators, filters and a ring modulator). The studio provided the tools for numerous Polish composers including Kotoński, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bogusław Schaeffer, Elżbieta Sikora and Krzysztof Knittel to experiment with new sounds and ways of composing. It was also host to Hugh Davies, Arne Nordheim, Kåre Kolberg, Lejaren Hiller, Roland Kayn, and Dubravko Detoni and other guest composers from around the world. Meeting one of the practical functions that had been claimed for the new facility, numerous film scores were produced there (more than 100 in the first eight years according to a 1965 source). They included electronic music and musique concrete for experimental films, a genre for which the People’s Republic of Poland drew international praise, as well as feature films such as Penderecki’s extraordinary soundtrack for Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie ( The Saragossa Manuscript , 1965) directed by Wojciech Has. Such was the studio’s reputation that it supplied soundtracks for movies abroad too, including Alain Resnais’s excursion into science fiction, Je t’aime, Je t’aime (1968).

As the essays contained in this book testify, the creative achievements of the composers, musicians and engineers in this small outpost of electroacoustic invention were considerable. But what was the value of this highly specialist institution to its patron, Polish Radio, and, by extension, the Polish state? What ideological or social purpose might be served by Kotoński’s Study for One Cymbal Stroke ? After all, the project of building socialism (or, from a different perspective, of maintaining power over a society which periodically expressed is objection to Soviet rule) would appear to have little interest in serialism, musique concrète , electronic music and other preoccupations of the avant-garde.

Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Photo: Andrzej Zborski.

The Sounds of October

The answers to these questions lie in the particular set of circumstances in which the People’s Republic of Poland found itself in after the death of Stalin. The dictator’s unexpected demise in March 1953 did not lead to an immediate dismantling of Stalinism, the brutal system of coercion and outright oppression which had been imposed on Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. The herald of change turned out to be the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow in February 1956 at which the violence and cruelty of his regime was admitted by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev in his ‘Secret Speech’. Leaked soon after, it was a trigger for the wave of public disaffection which broke across the Eastern Bloc in the months that followed: in Poland protests spilled onto the streets in the city of Poznań in June. The Party struggled to maintain rule. In October, Władysław Gomułka was elected to the position of First Secretary of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party), with considerable popular support. He set about distancing the new regime from Moscow, promising greater democratisation and freedom of expression, and dismantling Stalinist policies (like the collectivisation of agriculture).

To exorcise the ghosts of Stalinist irrationalism and violence, the post-Stalinist authorities in Eastern Europe turned to science, technology and other ‘rational’ measures of modernity. In 1956 Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin announced the Scientific-Technological Revolution ( Nauchno-tekhnicheskaia Revoliutsiia ), a programme intended to shape a new Soviet consciousness. A scientifically literate and technologically expert society would be better able to compete with capitalism in the Cold War. A new future was anointed by the launch of Sputnik in October 1957 which was to be shaped by cybernetics, artificial intelligence and computing, television, electronics as well as other ‘clean’ technologies. Progress in these fields was inevitable, at least according to the technological determinism to which Marxist-Leninism subscribed. In a bullish mood, Gomułka took the stage at the Third Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party in Warsaw in March 1959 to announce new conditions for intellectual life: ‘An atmosphere of free discussion in science, broadening contact with science all over the world, not excepting the capitalist countries, daring in handling new themes even though we are not always in accord with the directions this daring sometimes

takes. These are all developments that are conducive to intellectual revival and are propitious for scientific progress.’

This turn to science was a key factor in the establishment of PRES in autumn 1957. Patkowski, who studied in the music and physics faculties of the University of Warsaw, was later to highlight the fact that the studio’s first team was not made up of composers, ‘just highly qualified sound engineers and device constructors’. In point of fact, the post-Stalinist state permitted experiments in culture and science to be carried out not only by cyberneticists, psychologists or ergonomists, but also by composers, visual artists, film makers, architects, and musicians too. And PRES was one of a number of specialist facilities established during the period of de-Stalinisation to support this new zone of experiment. Many galleries, theatres, film and recording studios were described – by their creators – in the 1960s as ‘laboratories’. Belonging to the newly-licensed zone of ‘experimentation’ and sharing the official rhetoric of progress, these culture labs enjoyed access to funding and sometimes imported technical equipment, as well as relative autonomy, as Dariusz Brzostek and Joanna Walewska-Choptiany outline in their essay in this book.

This was also the context in which PRES’s composers and studio engineers were conscripted into the task of reviving the science fiction film. (This genre had not been approved during the Stalin years according to one commentator because it had been a vehicle for expressing early doubts in the early years of the Soviet Union about the possibility of utopia.) Sci-fi was the popular front of the Scientific-Technological Revolution. Cinema images of space craft speeding through dark universes, intelligent robots, flashing computer consoles, aliens speaking unknown languages, and exploding stars were accompanied by electronic soundtracks made in the studio. One of the first sci-fi movies of the new era was Der Schweigende Stern ( The Silent Star , 1960), an East German production made by the famous DEFA studios with an international cast and based on Stanisław Lem’s short story Astronauci ( The Astronauts , 1951). On the screen, communism has swept the planet and mankind enjoys the benefits of nuclear technology and biological engineering. International rivalries are a thing of the past. A threat to this happy utopia comes in the form of a mysterious object that, when decoded by ‘the world’s largest computer’, seems to threaten the destruction of the Earth. A spaceship is dispatched to Venus, the source of this ‘cosmic document’. There, the international crew find the ruins of a civilization that had itself already perished in a nuclear civil war. Drenched in pathos, the film’s message was unmistakable. Polish composer Andrzej Markowski recorded the soundtrack for The SilentStar at PRES. The studio’s team, including Szlifirski and Rudnik, produced suitably extraterrestrial sounds by constructing an electronic oscillator which the composer could manipulate – like a theremin – with the wave of a hand. Using PRES’s magnetic tape recorders, Markowski, the composer, produced a brilliant sonic collage. Elements of the film’s sound design – like the musical interaction of astronauts with the illuminated keys and buttons of the on-board computer – overlap with the highly atmospheric soundtrack. As The Silent Star made clear, electronic sounds were destined to play a part in humanity’s future.

The foregoing has been an extract from David Crowley, ‘Introduction – “The Right to Experiment” in Ultra Sounds. The Sonic Art of Polish Radio Experimental Studio, published by Kehrer Heidelberg Berlin with Adam Mickiewicz Institute , ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź

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Polish Radio Experimental Studio

Eugeniusz Rudnik in the Studio in 1981. Still from Gieniu, Ratuj!. 2008. Directed by Bolesław Błaszczyk. Image courtesy of Bolesław Błaszczyk

On 13-14 October 2017, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, in collaboration with Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, will hold a conference devoted to the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES), to mark the 60th anniversary of its founding.

The subjects of panel discussions will include the socio-historical background of the Studio, the reception of its autonomous compositions and musical “illustrations”, followed by reflection on the new musical genres that emerged under its influence and the aspect of interdisciplinarity.

MORE ABOUT THE PRES & THE CONFERENCE

The PRES was founded in Warsaw in 1957. Its establishment had symbolic value, as it became a major platform for freedom of expression within the Eastern Bloc. Opened just a few years after WDR Cologne’s renowned Studio for Electronic Music (1951) and Club d’Essai de la Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (1948), the PRES was set up within the state broadcaster, much like the other two. Conceived as a general studio, supervised by a musicologist, Józef Patkowski, the PRES became one of the most innovative enterprises of the communist era.

The history of the PRES is a story of the development of electronic music as well as the phenomena of sound and vision experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, which remains little-recognized within the history of art and the history of exhibitions. The conference by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź will aim to preserve this history and draw attention to the significance of the studio, not only within the field of music and composition, but also those of visual arts and cinematography. It will attempt to introduce the PRES as an institution oriented towards audio-visual experimentation, constantly looking forward, while being influenced by visual arts and happenings, which allowed the establishment of a new language open for the listener’s interpretation.

List of the speakers includes among others:  Bolek Błaszczyk, Dariusz Brzostek, Cindy Bylander, David Crowley, David Grubbs, Ewa Guziołek-Tubelewicz, Sanne Krogh Groth, Aleksandra Kędziorek, Flo Menezes, Frances Morgan, Lars Mørch Finborud, Ola Nordal, Barbara Okoń-Makowska, Holly Rogers, Joanna Walewska, Laura Zattra.

The conference is organized by Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz and The Adam Mickiewicz Institute

The Adam Mickiewicz Institute , acting under its brand Culture.pl, is a national cultural institute, whose mission is to build and communicate the cultural dimension of the Poland brand through active participation in international cultural exchange. The Institute has carried out cultural projects in 70 countries. The AMI has presented more than 5,500 cultural events, attracting an audience of more than 52,5 million on five continents. All of the Institute’s projects are carried out under our flagship brand, Culture.pl.

The Institute’s Culture.pl portal offers a daily information service covering key events related to Polish culture around the world: In addition to information on events organised in Poland and abroad, the portal features numerous artist profiles, reviews, essays, descriptive articles and information about cultural institutions. The site, which in 2015 drew more than 4.5 million visitors from around the world, is available in three languages: Polish, English and Russian. In 2015 the portal won the Guarantee of Culture award in the category Culture on the Net.

Find out more: www.culture.pl

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Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look

2014, post: notes on modern and contemporary art around the globe

How important a role can a site play in creating and fostering artistic experimentation? The case of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES), established in Warsaw in 1957 under the auspices of Poland’s official state broadcaster, provides a fascinating insight into the importance of a site – understood equally as institution, physical space, and a circle of individuals – as a key catalyst for avant-garde exploration and production. This online publication includes newly commissioned texts as well as archival audio and visual materials - all available online at http://post.at.moma.org/themes/14-polish-radio-experimental-studio-a-close-look

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The revolution of electronic music in Central Eastern Europe: Polish Radio Experimental Studio

Kaufmann angéla kyra · 25 05 2022.

Polish Radio Experimental Studio—PRES was one of Europe’s first electronic music centers, founded in Warsaw in 1957, as a department of Polish Radio. Although the studio was a place to record autonomous electronic tracks, this was not its main purpose: it started as a space for independent compositions, sound illustrations for radio dramas and the creation of soundtracks for theater, film and dance, but it became one of the cradles of electronic music in Central Eastern Europe with over 300 compositions and an exciting history, as PRES was one of the few electronic music studios to operate behind the Iron Curtain .

At the end of World War II, formerly independent Poland found itself in a heavily Soviet-influenced zone. In spite of some brief liberalization phases, the following 40 years of communism was a period of political and economic repression, ending only in 1989. During this period, censorship constantly worried numerous Polish artists and musicians, as the consequences could be severe if they produced work that was deemed decadent, anti-Soviet or simply incompatible with the state-approved aesthetics of ‘socialist realism.’

Surprisingly, in spite of these conditions, one of Europe’s first institutions dedicated to experimental and electronic music was actually founded in Poland, also known as the island of artistic freedom in the 60s, 70s and 80s. PRES is one of the few Eastern European studios that had electronic music devices and mostly professional engineers, which made PRES a center for research into the possibilities of tape music and the creation of many astonishing original electroacoustic works.

Electronic music institutions in Europe

In 1951, the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio (WDR) was founded, along with Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRMC) in Paris. In 1953, Elektronisches Studio of the Technical University of Berlin followed. In 1954, Experimentalstudio was founded in Gravesano, Switzerland, followed by the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano and Nippon Hoso Kyokai Studio in Tokyo. PRES was the seventh radio studio to produce electronic music worldwide.

For 28 years, the studio was led by founder Józef Patkowski, musicologist and sound engineer, as well as chairman of the Polish Composers’ Union. Composer Ryszard Szeremeta took over between 1985 and 1998, followed by Krzysztof Szlifirski, who was responsible for the technical concept of the studio, as well. The Experimental Studio was registered by Polskie Radio Program II in March 2004 and Marek Zwyrzykowski has been responsible for its operations since then.

Sounds from the studio

The first track, called Study for a Cymbal Stroke (Włodzimierz Kotoński Etiuda na jedno uderzenie w talerz, 1959) was recorded in PRES in 1959, evoking dramatic changes in the People’s Republic. The sound of a single strike of a cymbal was recorded on tape, and remastered with the studio’s filters.

Kotoński’s composition was the first in a significant series of musical productions. Patkowski envisioned PRES as a kind of laboratory where the composer, working closely with a skilled engineer, could manipulate sounds manually (by editing and connecting tapes) and electronically (using oscillators, filters and ring modulators). The studio has provided a number of Polish composers, including Kotoński, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bogusław Schaeffer and Elżbieta Sikora, with the means to experiment with new sounds and ways of composing.

PRES featured several young and renowned musicians such as Arne Nordheime from Norway, from the Lejaren Hiller US, François-Bernard Mâche from France, or Franco Evangelisti from Italy. Although in practice, PRES focused on autonomous experimental works, its main official task was to compose music for radio, television and film, which again led to interesting paradoxes: for example, the same composer could be composing an experimental work with a hidden anti-government message one day and be asked to compose the soundtrack for a propaganda film the next.

“Its golden era was in the 1970s. Many of the best works have been forgotten, especially because in the last quarter of the 20th century in Polish and Eastern European ‘serious’ music has been dominated by conservative, neoclassical and neo-romantic tendencies. From this point of view, experimental works were considered nonsense. Also, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, artistic circles in many Eastern European countries became extremely interested in exchange with Western cultural circles, and very often undervalued their own tradition. It’s only now, after almost 30 years, that this tendency has changed,” project coordinator Michal Mendyk pointed out to Ableton.

Source: ableton , Culture.pl

• electronic music

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notes on art in a global context

Central & Eastern Europe

Alchemist Cabinet of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio: Music Scores of and for Experiments

Michał Libera

January 2, 2014

This text was originally published under the theme “Polish Radio Experimental Studio: A Close Look”. The theme was developed in partnership with Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (MSŁ). It was edited by Magdalena Moskalewicz, MoMA with Daniel Muzyczuk, MSŁ. The original content items in this theme can be found  here .

Just as alchemists in the Middle Ages were the masters of arcane knowledge, so the core members of the Studio—the sound engineers—were masters of new technology in music. Let us look into the written records of their sacred knowledge: the music scores.

The artist’s studio—and the musician’s in particular—has always been an alchemist’s cabinet. And the visitor—not to be confused with a snob—has never been interested in how it [art-making] was done. The visitor wants to feel something and not study something—even if [the art is] loaded with technical issues, [the visitor, without a basic understanding of these, would be,] perhaps, cheated.” 1 Eugeniusz Rudnik, “Sympozjum ‘studyjne’ na temat technologii,’’ in Magda Roszkowska, ed., Studio Eksperyment: Leksykon. Zbiór tekstów (Warsaw: Bęc Zmiana, 2012), p. 40.

The casually spoken words of Eugeniusz Rudnik seem to me to provide a remarkably accurate introduction to a history of Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES). At the time of its founding by Józef Patkowski in 1957, the Studio was Radio’s most progressive and ambitious project. From today’s perspective, it seems to have been a marvel of a very peculiar nature, and this nature is nimbly summed up by Rudnik. The Studio’s famous Black Room was designed to be known for its output—the sound recordings that emerged from it—and not for the methods employed by those who worked there. Indeed, a kind of alchemy has been afoot here: for more than half a century, considerable effort has been made to shroud the Black Room in darkness—to turn its history into a mystery and its legend into a myth. Just as alchemists in the Middle Ages were the masters of arcane knowledge, so the core members of the Studio—the sound engineers—were masters of new technology in music. Let us look into the written records of their sacred knowledge: the music scores. These shed light on the experimental approach that prevailed in the Studio’s inner sanctum.

In an interview published in 1987, Magdalena Radziejowska asked Józef Patkowski to identify the Studio’s most distinguishing trait. Patkowski replied: “[It is] most of all its technological and programming independence. The Studio was conceived as an instrument, a sound laboratory whose apparatus is available for use by composers together with sound engineers and the engineers who design the equipment. Together they assemble data from which a composer can create his idea. And this is exceptional worldwide. There are no composers on the Studio’s board or crew. There are only specialists of sound design.” 2 Józef Patkowski in conversation with Magdalena Radziejowska, in Studio Eksperyment , p. 93. One can sense a barely hidden philosophy of experimentation in Patkowski’s words. The Studio was not about aesthetics; it was about data . It was not only about skills and craft, as in art; it was also about knowledge and procedures, as in science. This amalgam was enclosed in a small room full of the latest technology. Equally mysterious were the amazing skills of the Studio’s crew. “The buzzword ‘experiment’ was not an empty term, thanks to the undogmatic approach of the sound engineers Eugeniusz Rudnik and Bohdan Mazurek, who were later also composers. Their courage in taking risks as well as their erotic bravery made the difference between them and other musicians who worked in the Studio and were trying to create sound that conformed to a priori ideas, hardly ever allowing ideas to flow directly from the creative encounter of a researcher and his material.” 3 Antoni Beksiak, “Dlaczego Eugeniusz?’’ available online www.culture.pl (accessed on June 10, 2013). What were they doing there? Still—scientific language: the recherches in Pierre Schaeffer’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the algorithms in Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson’s seminal book on computer music, 4 Lejaren Hiller and L. M. Isaacson, Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer , (New York: McGraw-Hill,1959). and the word “experimental” in Polish Radio’s Experimental Studio. One of the particularities of PRES that Patkowski neglected to mention was that it published nothing to introduce or simply describe its practices. Actually, it published almost nothing.

I used to think of this publishing lapse as a shortcoming or a scandal, but there may have been substantial reasons for it. The Studio’s independence, in which Patkowski took such pride, was at least partly due to its low profile. No one really understood what its engineers were doing. For more than fifty years, the only way to learn about the fruits of their labors was to listen to the radio or attend concerts. Rare concerts and rare radio broadcasts. Even in the 1990s, when recordings from GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) and WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) had attained the status of classics, and Schaeffer’s and Stockhausen’s manuals and blueprints were appearing on music academy syllabuses everywhere, not a single book or full-length album bore the imprimatur of PRES, which by that time had gone dormant. But there were scores.

The scores are not leaks. They give no insight into the sound engineers’ techniques. Yet they do contribute to an understanding of what was experimental about the Experimental Studio. Paradoxically, the presence at PRES of this conservative and perhaps even regressive musical tool tells a tale of an alternative way of experimenting. And even if the scores originated in the world of composers, their nature in this instance is comparatively open, clear, transparent—and published.

The status accorded to scores at PRES is ambiguous on many levels. The documents are a symbol of what, in the 1960s, was called “autonomous creation,” as opposed to “utilitarian creation,” which served film, theater, and radio soundtracks. Despite all that has been said, the Studio’s main pride lay not in the mysteries of the Black Room but in the list of critically acclaimed composers that it attracted from all over Europe: Włodzimierz Kotoński, Andrzej Dobrowolski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Bogusław Schaeffer, Arne Nordheim, Dubravko Detoni, François- Bernard Mâche, Lejaren Hiller, and others turned the Studio into a prestigious unit. Until 1965, every musical composition registered in the archives was by a professional, academically trained composer.

On the other hand, there are many reasons to think that scores were of little importance in the Studio’s actual functioning. First of all, consider their quantity. Of the hundreds of compositions registered in the Studio’s archive, few are scored. The exact number depends on how you count them: seven scores of what are essentially tape music compositions 5 Etude for One Cymbal Stroke and Aela , by Włodzimierz Kotoński; Symphony , by Bogusław Schaeffer; and Music for Magnetic Tape No. 1 , Music for Magnetic Tape and Oboe Solo , Music for Magnetic Tape and Piano Solo , and Music for Tape and Bass Clarinet , by Andrzej Dobrowolski. were published, accompanied by recordings created in the Studio; a greater number of instrumental scores was issued, each followed by a tape prepared in the Studio; and dozens of unpublished sketches were produced by composers who used them to communicate their ideas to the engineers.

Second, consider the dates. The first electronic piece that Kotoński recorded in the Studio was his Etude for One Cymbal Stroke , in 1959. The score was published in 1972. “Electronic music that is controlled by the composer from its conception to its final recording seems to be the kind of music that can reach the listener in a way that precludes the unforeseeable, such as performers’ errors and other unpredictable events,” commented Barbara Makowska-Okoń, a sound engineer who started at the studio in the mid-1970s. 6 Barbara Okoń-Makowska, “Projekcja dźwięku,” in Studio Eksperyment , p. 147. If the ultimate idea of Kotoński’s Etude for One Cymbal Stroke was recorded on tape in 1959, why publish a score for the piece in 1972? So that it might be performed again? Another question mark. If we take a closer look at the score of this first autonomous piece conceived at PRES, we see that it reflects the inability of the composer to represent what Józef Patkowski described as the “sounds of new timbral qualities, new colors” 7 Józef Patkowski, “Perspektywy muzyki elektronicznej,” in Studio Eksperyment , p. 85. that suffused music experiments. The symbols and the setup were taken from what is today considered to be the first electronic music score ever published, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Studie II . What we have here is a graph with two coordinates: the vertical (organized in four simultaneous systems) charts frequencies and dynamic levels; the horizontal registers the passage of sound events.

But the rectangles, triangles, and trapezoids representing sound events contain no information about timbre or texture. This is because the sound quality in Kotoński’s piece has been documented in the form of a recording—it does not need to be represented. Hence, six out of seven passages in the written instructions for his Etude are given in the present perfect tense. “The sound material for this Etude has been produced . . . ,” “The recorded sound has been transposed . . . ,” etc. 8 Włodzimierz Kotoński, Etude for One Cymbal Stroke , (Warsaw: PWM, 1967). The score was not intended as a set of instructions for performing the piece, but rather as a score for listening, in the manner of Rainer Wehinger’s 1970 score for Ligeti’s Artikulation , composed in 1958. 9 Wehinger conceived the graphic notation for Ligeti’s composition twelve years after the piece was composed and realized on tape. Called Hörpartitur ( Aural Score ), Wehinger’s score was meant to guide the listener rather than the performer. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). It is not surprising, then, that in the four decades since Kotoński’s Etude was published, it has been performed only once.

The deferred writing of the scores might explain why they were published at all. Most probably, Patkowski, perhaps believing that serious music is written music, requested them together with theoretical explanations of the pieces from composers who wanted their works included in the PRES archive of autonomous compositions. But, in fact, the scores were nothing more than a formality to be deposited in the archive and forgotten, while the real work was being performed in the Black Room.

Andrzej Dobrowolski was the composer who invested the most energy in writing scores at the Studio during the early years. Much more detailed and precise than Kotoński’s, the four pieces that Dobrowolski published at PRES together comprise the institution’s most complex blueprint for electronic music notation. Three of the works were scored for magnetic tape and a solo instrument: oboe, bass clarinet, and piano, respectively. Prior to these, Music for Magnetic Tape No. 1 , printed by Music Publications Kraków in 1964, was the first electronic music score published in Poland. The fifty-page document contained sixteen pages of instructions and thirty- five pages dedicated to the score itself—all that to cover five minutes and sixteen seconds of electronic music composed from recorded and synthetic sounds. (Among the recorded sounds were sung vowels and piano strings resonating to a singer’s voice.) The charts of transformations are given, and then the score.

In his highly complex, ultra-precise scores, Dobrowolski created a paradoxical situation: the more experimental his compositions sound, the more detailed the score; and the more detailed the score, the less experimental the realization of the work in the Studio. What could possibly have been experimental in a sound engineer’s following the instructions for Music for Magnetic Tape No. 1 ? Since everything was written down in exacting detail, the engineer fulfilled the role of technician. He just needed to do the job. There was no need for alchemy, nothing to unravel, check or improve. The procedure was fixed; nothing was left to chance. Here, an experiment and a score were mutually exclusive. It was an either-or situation, a zero-sum game. Or, it was a vantage point from which to gain fresh understanding of the term “experiment.”

Experimental Score

In the same year, 1964, Bogusław Schaeffer started working on Symphony , his electronic magnum opus, also known as Electronic Symphony . The score was finished two years later, and two years after that, it was published as a sixty-eight page book, including eighteen pages of instructions.

Symphony ’s graphic score does not spark the visual/auditive imagination of the performer. Each of its elements is clearly defined, leaving no confusion about the meaning of the composer’s message, yet affording the performer a certain amount of freedom. That freedom lies first of all in exploring the potential offered by new technology. Schaeffer really addressed this piece to sound engineers, leaving it up to them to test how the meaning contained in the graphic notation can be transmitted by changing media. As Schaeffer himself commented: “In the development of music, particular elements move within the hierarchy of their functions—that is why Symphony has been and will continue to be interpretable.” Among the graphic signs, one finds symbols for sound events such as “pure tone + glissandi,” “different pitch levels + reverberation,” “a short beat, sharply finished,” “a shapeless, much deformed sound, indefinite in its pitch and substance—completely ‘anonymous’ material,” and “irregular tone-mixtures—described separately.” As Schaeffer indicated, it is up to the interpreter to decide how to execute a particular sign so that it will contribute more or less to the rhythmic or harmonic dimensions of the piece.

The sound events are prescribed for each of the symphony’s four movements and are organized in four simultaneous tracks indicated by boxes. The boxes are of different time lengths but form quite a clear pulse. The duration of the piece is given. In the end, then, the sound effects can be quite varied, depending not so much on the varied interpretations of the sound events (like “pure tone + glissandi”) but rather on the changing interpretations of the links between the determined and undetermined aspects of the score. Thus, one reading may result in four voices becoming one sound event, while in another they can subvert the time units set by the composer. In other words, the experiment here is rooted neither in the sound engineer’s skills nor in the final sound of the piece but in the disjunction of the two.

Experiment is no single person’s property, competence, or privilege. Just as Schaeffer’s work is over and done with, so any engineer’s work will be over and done with. But at their intersections, there will always be a slight misunderstanding that will generate new information.

The most explicit experimental score of PRES was yet to come.Twelve years after publishing his first score at the Studio, Włodzimierz Kotoński published the score for Aela , a piece combining aleatoric 10 Aleatorism is a compositional technique of applying widely understood chance operations to define the parameters of a piece of music. and electronic music that he had released on tape five years earlier. The nineteen-page document is essentially a showpiece, a graphic complement to the written introduction that precedes it in the published volume. Not one of its graphic elements needs to be interpreted. A performer is meant to follow only the set of basic principles set out in the introduction. What Kotoński had in mind was not a piece as such but rather “a family of electronic pieces” 11 Włodzimierz Kotoński, Aela , (Warsaw: PWM, 1975). generated from the same clear principles and guidelines concerning sound material, frequency and time interval scales, sound intensity, spatial distribution, and aleatoric procedures. For example, the sound material consists entirely of sine waves—intervals of 25 Hz in the range between 25 Hz and 10000 Hz—but the actual sound material of the piece derives from the process of building it following the composer’s principles and guidelines. What the composer has designed is the framework within which a series of decisions is to be made and their interrelated consequences discovered. In Aela , the focus is not on the score itself, but rather on a clear and regular idea that the performer refers back to. No symbols are needed. All that is necessary is for the piece to be repeated by virtually anyone.

Experimental Performance

Symphony and Aela have in common the assumptions that no performance of the piece is definitive and that the work’s experimental nature is infinitely enduring. The point of these experiments is not merely to produce sounds that cannot be programmed or foreseen but also to dismantle with a score the black box of experimentality. In these cases, the score is an open agenda that fixes neither the substance of the work nor its effect. Unlike Kotoński’s aural score for his Etude and Dobrowolski’s detailed graphic transcription of Music for Magnetic Tape No. 1 , which negate the experimental, Symphony and Aela trigger it off by embracing a philosophy of experimentation that is far from the scientific/alchemical ideas of arcane knowledge. With these scores we arrive at the definition of experimental music given by the composer John Cage, who called it a clear procedure that anyone can carry out, see the outcome of, and repeat over and over again. This is possible thanks to scores that are open invitations to experiment, as opposed to non-scored or closely scored pieces best realized in the precincts of the Experimental Studio. These two kinds of work represent divergent philosophies of experimentation: one is an open-source approach published in the form of an open score; the other is an alchemist’s black room, mysterious and inaccessible to all but the alchemists themselves—the sound engineers.

• 1 Eugeniusz Rudnik, “Sympozjum ‘studyjne’ na temat technologii,’’ in Magda Roszkowska, ed., Studio Eksperyment: Leksykon. Zbiór tekstów (Warsaw: Bęc Zmiana, 2012), p. 40.
• 2 Józef Patkowski in conversation with Magdalena Radziejowska, in Studio Eksperyment , p. 93.
• 3 Antoni Beksiak, “Dlaczego Eugeniusz?’’ available online www.culture.pl (accessed on June 10, 2013).
• 4 Lejaren Hiller and L. M. Isaacson, Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer , (New York: McGraw-Hill,1959).
• 5 Etude for One Cymbal Stroke and Aela , by Włodzimierz Kotoński; Symphony , by Bogusław Schaeffer; and Music for Magnetic Tape No. 1 , Music for Magnetic Tape and Oboe Solo , Music for Magnetic Tape and Piano Solo , and Music for Tape and Bass Clarinet , by Andrzej Dobrowolski.
• 6 Barbara Okoń-Makowska, “Projekcja dźwięku,” in Studio Eksperyment , p. 147.
• 7 Józef Patkowski, “Perspektywy muzyki elektronicznej,” in Studio Eksperyment , p. 85.
• 8 Włodzimierz Kotoński, Etude for One Cymbal Stroke , (Warsaw: PWM, 1967).
• 9 Wehinger conceived the graphic notation for Ligeti’s composition twelve years after the piece was composed and realized on tape. Called Hörpartitur ( Aural Score ), Wehinger’s score was meant to guide the listener rather than the performer. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Towards a Semiology of Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
• 10 Aleatorism is a compositional technique of applying widely understood chance operations to define the parameters of a piece of music.
• 11 Włodzimierz Kotoński, Aela , (Warsaw: PWM, 1975).

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Polish Radio Experimental Studio celebrates 60th anniversary with a two day conference

Eugeniusz Rudnik, co-founder and longest running service engineer at Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia, in 15 Corners Of The World (2014)

The event examines the historical and social conditions that led to the formation of the Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia

This October a two day conference will be held in Łódź in celebration of Studio Eksperymentalne Polskiego Radia (or, in English, Polish Radio Experimental Studio – PRES for short). The studio was founded in Warsaw in 1957 as a platform for artistic expression in the communist Eastern Bloc, a few years after WDR Cologne and Club d’Essai de la Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française opened in the West. Led by the late musicologist Józef Patkowski until 1985, PRES promoted the development of electronic music and audiovisual experiments in Poland throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Organised by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, the conference’s talks will address the history of the studio and its impact not only on contemporary music but also the more experimental wings of visual and cinematic arts in Poland. In addition, there will be screenings of films with PRES soundtracks, and concerts featuring new performances of works developed at the studio. Finally, members of Warsaw Museum of Modern Art will present their plans for the reconstruction of the studio.

Speakers include Antoni Beksiak, Bolek Błaszczyk, Dariusz Brzostek, Cindy Bylander, David Crowley, David Grubbs, Ewa Guziołek-Tubelewicz, Sanne Krogh Groth, Aleksandra Kędziorek, Flo Menezes, Lars Mørch Finborud, Ola Nordal, Barbara Okoń-Makowska, Holly Rogers, Joanna Walewska, Laura Zattra, The Wire 's Contributing Editor Frances Morgan, and others. There will also be a chance to meet people who worked at the studio such as Krzysztof Szlifirski and producers Barabara Okoń-Makowska and Ewa Guziołek Tubelewicz.

The event is free and takes place on 13 & 14 October at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź .