Challenges & Obstacles: Polish Music in 2020
This year, all of Poland rapped to collect money for healthcare workers but, other than that, was anyone actually able to focus on listening to music?This year, all of Poland rapped to collect money for healthcare workers but, other than that, was anyone actually able to focus on listening to music?
The country raps
28th April 2020 was the day that changed Poland. It was on this day, that the rappers Solar and Mata announced the #Hot16Challenge2, after which nothing was ever the same…
To start, let me explain what we’re even talking about: participants were meant to record a 16-line verse, then nominate more people, and donate money to a previously determined cause. The first Hot16 Challenge took place in 2014 –after the popularity of the international Ice Bucket Challenge, in which people admittedly didn’t rap, but rather poured buckets of ice-cold water on themselves for a good cause.
Over 200 rappers, a few artists from other musical environments, and several amateurs took part in the first challenge. In 2020, Solar and Mata’s call to rap and raise funds for medical professionals was answered with an avalanche of original verses. They were recorded by rappers and their producers, corporations, YouTubers, clergy of all faiths and even up-and-coming opera singer/break-dancer Jakub Józef Orliński and beloved children’s music singer Majka Jeżowska.
The initiative started at the beginning of the pandemic, when when an atmosphere of anxiety and disorientation prevailed. Each day, we were given new, sometimes contradictory, information about the virus that threatened us. The majority of society exhibited temporary hygiene-related obsessive-compulsive behaviours, though there was no shortage of corona sceptics either. The only thing that brought us together was the #Hot16Challenge2.
It was an opportunity for truly unrestrained self-expression – one could say anything in whatever way they liked. Some would even forget about the 16-line rule. The initiative originated from the hip-hop environment, so most of the pieces referred somehow to rap music, or rather to a stereotypical concept of it – one that dates from the times when baggy trousers were still in vogue. Some songs, fruit of uninhibited creative acts, made no sense whatsoever, others were pieces created and polished for weeks. Some were recorded with mobile phones, while other participants produced professional music videos. And then, content negating the pandemic, mocking the fundraiser, or questioning the honest intentions of the participants quickly started to appear…
On 15th May 2020, less than a month after the challenge started, Marcin Napiórkowski wrote that:
Quick calculations for the 100 most popular pieces from the #Hot16Challenge show that Poles have already played them over 150 million times, which, with the average recording being slightly over two minutes, gives us the astronomical number of 300 million minutes, 5,2 million hours, 216 000 days. or 592 years.
Nervously refreshing YouTube when awaiting the new Hot16s will certainly be one of my most distinct (and painful) memories from the pandemic. New names appearing in the open tabs in my browser caused a rapid influx of dopamine to the brain, very tempting in the times of self-isolating, social distancing and stress caused by the new situation. How much time did I waste browsing Hot16s? Probably over 24 hours. Looking at the results of my YouTube search eight months later, I’m accompanied by an unpleasant feeling – I know I watched all of them, but I remember almost nothing. Some curiosities did stick in my head though, but there are only two Hot16s that I could hum – a lively song by the Tricity band Undadasea (which paved their way towards greater popularity) and an improv in the spirit of the scat technique done by Marian Lichtman.
What will Polish music have got left after #Hot16Challenge2? It was certainly the biggest musical initiative in the history of the Polish nation – it’s difficult to imagine such widespread singing and rapping happening again. Several quotes from the songs will certainly enter our language, including the esoteric poetry of President Andrzej Duda’s Hot16: ‘They don’t ask for your name, fighting the sharp shadow of the fog’.
Four million złoty was collected during the first fundraiser, which was used to buy seven ambulances. #Hot16Challenge2 triggered plenty of debates, such as those concerning funding healthcare or taxes, which were usually avoided by most hip-hop entrepreneurs.
Local initiatives
While we’re talking about hip-hop – in 2020, Emilia Stachowska, Magda Staniszewska, Patryk Zakrzewski and I published a guide to the history of Polish rap in 60 albums. It was quite a breakneck task – it would be easier to create a list of 600 albums! Did the passing year change anything in rap music?
Probably not. At the beginning of the decade, we observed the flourishing of independent labels – plenty of them collapsed in the last few years, which was epitomised by Prosto –the rapper Sokół’s company – deciding to quit releasing albums and focus solely on apparel. The economic crisis caused by the pandemic strongly affected the music industry – only the top players managed to stay afloat. The ones whose significance grew include Def Jam Poland, belonging to Universal Music Group. The international monopolist signed contracts with established Polish rappers, young Internet celebrities, pop singers and rap rookies.
It’s Def Jam who released one of the most appreciated albums of the year – W/88 by Włodi, the rapper and producer of 1988 (Przemysław Jankowski, better known from the popular duo Syny). 1988’s beats are very refreshing for Polish rap – deep, enshrouded in warm sounds of synthesisers, humming, and somewhat dirty. Sometimes swaying lazily, sometimes unsettling, but always wrapped in deep bass – after all, the most important influence here is undoubtedly British music.
Polish rap is very attached to its short history, and it often suffocates under layers of follow-ups and notes for the savvy. W/88 moves within this nostalgic world but lets in some fresh air as well. Admittedly, the fresh air metaphor slightly misses the mark, as the album’s atmosphere is thick and sticky, though not as much as that of the album by Tonfa, whose guest performance we hear in one of Włodi’s songs. I believe that while producing W/88, Jankowski listened to Tonfa’s EP, released in 2019, plenty of times. And Tonfa probably listened to Jankowski a lot – and so the wheel of Polish rap goes round.
Popular rappers, in turn, love to reference their own image. It’s difficult to separate Quebonafide or Taco Hemingway’s artistic endeavours from their marketing activities. Even when they speak about societal issues, it’s connected to promoting their new albums. It’s even more exhausting than the ouroboros of references to the history of the genre.
While I’m complaining – another exhausting aspect of Polish rap is the length of the albums. It’s quite a challenge to listen to the new records by Undadasea (18 songs) and donGURALesko (21 songs) all at once. They’re excellently produced, extraordinary releases, but why are they so long? Haven’t Polish rappers heard that the audience’s attention span is becoming increasingly shorter from year to year due to millions of notifications sent by dozens of apps and social media?
The world of books
Literature allows for greater focus. In the world of hyperlinks, pop-ups, feeds, funny cats and full discographies of niche artists being one click of the mouse away, a book seems to be a space of peace and silence. However, following the book market can lead to FOMO as well – there’s so many interesting new releases that it’s hard to keep up.
The celebrated music books of 2020 were concerned with counterculture and various currents of alternative music. Dzika Rzecz: Polska Muzyka i Transformacja 1989-1993 (Wild Thing: Polish Music and Transformation 1989-1993) by Rafał Księżyk describes the unusual period of political transformation in Poland, which also influenced music. It’s a story of bands such as Apteka, Armia, Brygada Kryzys, Houk, Izrael, Kazik, Kinsky, Kormorany, Max i Kelner, and T. Love. The underground meets popular music, which has stopped being controlled by the state. New clubs, TV programmes, music zines appear, the first raves are organised. Aesthetics and morals changed, and so did language and the economy. It’s not just a book about music, but about contemporary history as well. Księżyk possesses an astonishing ability to emphasise certain symbolic events or motifs without flattening the narration, and still showing the complexity of the era. It’s a shame that he doesn’t write history textbooks…
30 Lat Polskiej Sceny Techno (30 Years of Polish Techno Scene), edited by Radosław Tereszczuk, Łukasz Krajewski and Artur Wojtczak, is a stream of consciousness of dozens of DJs and producers who built the Polish electronic music scene over 30 years (the book isn’t limited to techno). We read about memories from various cities, scenes, environments – and it’s not always cheerful. It’s certainly not a story of great success, which is why it’s particularly worth reading.
Wrzeszcz! (Scream!), an equally complicated story, is the autobiography of Polish musician and composer Mikołaj Trzaska, written as an interview conducted by Tomasz Gregorczyk and Janusz Jabłoński. Other than a huge chunk of jazz music history and encounters with the most remarkable contemporary improvisers, we also learn about Trzaska’s family traumas (a connection of Polish-German and Polish-Jewish roots cannot be uncomplicated).
The year 2020 marked the release of three important books describing key figures for the development of the 20th century Polish music, in-depth information about whom had been difficult to find until now.
Bolesław Błaszczyk’s Andrzej Bieżan. Intuicja. Wolność (Andrzej Bieżan, Intuition, Freedom) is a fascinating story of the prematurely departed composer-performer-improviser-visionary, whose life became a legend, but who almost no one knew any details about. Błaszczyk combined musicological meticulousness with reporter’s verve.
In Patkowski. Ambasador Muzyki z Marsa (Patkowski: Music Ambassador from Mars), Agnieszka Pindera describes the life and oeuvre of the founder of Polish Radio Experimental Studio Józef Patkowski. To do that, one needs to provide a summary of the political situation and discussions concerning aesthetics, paint a picture of the musical environment at the time… It’s a dense story, yet it doesn’t overwhelm – probably because the book makes Patkowski seem like an old, good friend of ours.
‘Piszę Tylko Muzykę’. Kazimierz Serocki (‘I Only Write Music’: Kazimierz Serocki) by Iwona Lindstedt isn’t just a biography – it’s also a detailed monograph of the oeuvre of the composer, who never gave interviews or talked about his music. Another book beside Sonorystyka w Twórczości Kompozytorów Polskich w XX Wieku (Sonorism is 20th Century Polish Composers’ Music) that should find its way onto the bookshelves of everyone interested in Polish contemporary music.
Problems concentrating
I’m writing this summary with remorse, as I often struggled with listening to music this year. I put plenty of very good albums aside without listening to them attentively. A perfect album for 2020? Antonina Nowacka’s Lamunan – based on vocals without lyrics, delicate sounds of the surroundings, echoes and reverberations. The artist invented the material for the record while singing in a Javanese cave but the meandering soundwaves don’t bounce off a cave’s walls – the album was recorded in the Modlin Fortress on the outskirts of Warsaw. The record provides meditative focus, as well as an intensity that would do no shame to a choir.
Or Coals’ docusoap – slow-paced songs with flowingly spread time signatures, sounds like it was made for dancing to with a broken leg. Their compositions are very original and completely derivative at the same time – it’s a fascinating combination. The same could be said about Kacha Kowalczyk’s vocals – she can imitate well-known voices while simultaneously sounding absolutely unique. It’s a mimicry-album preying on trends and sentiments. Perhaps the next release will be slightly more innovative?
Kowalczyk’s vocal skills can also be heard in Karaoke Dub from the Jazda Polska (Polish Ride) album by the duo Sarmacja – it’s not easy to achieve maximum expression with minimum means. Everyone praised docusoap but I find the guest performance in the cloud of Masovian dub much more interesting. By the way, Jazda Polska was also very appropriate listen for 2020.
To listen or to pet a cat?
I have many years of experience in petting a cat, while simultaneously immersing myself in a book. I’m writing these words with one hand as the other holds a limply dangling cat, who regularly comes over to receive the cuddles that are due.
However, watching an opera in the company of a cat is something completely new to me. At the beginning of the lockdown, I was happy that I’d be able to watch the Vienna opera performances with Tomasz Konieczny in the cast, but it quickly turned out that the experience defeated me. The music combined with the image seemed absolutely unconvincing. I could hear the emotionally charged vocals but the view imposed by the camera made it impossible for me to get intoxicated with the magic of the opera. An extremely pretentious statement, isn’t it? Still, all opera fans can confirm that there’s something about the performances that causes a slight shift in perception – the excess of emotions coming from the stage influences our brain chemistry. While watching an opera on my computer, I couldn’t even pet the cat properly.
I’m writing about opera because watching a concert at home is much easier – it’s an experience almost identical to listening to a podcast. However, there’s one type of concerts that is even less digestible when streamed online than opera. Improvised concerts.
Streaming, of course, is a great achievement, and I hope that streams will remain a part of our reality even when the pandemic ends. They enable a universal access to culture and the popularisation of musical knowledge. Plenty of people have no time or money to participate in festivals. Some are embarrassed – the atmosphere of cultural events isn’t always hospitable, sometimes one may feel like an intruder. Besides, numerous creators of high culture create really hermetic art – sometimes it’s necessary to get used to its language. Free and easy access to culture would create new, more varied audiences.
In the haze of literality
It’s obviously necessary to consider the way of streaming cultural events. I’ve got pretty poor eyesight and I usually can’t see what the artists are doing on stage. Watching the opening concert of Warsaw Autumn (Warszawska Jesień) on my computer screen, I experienced an aesthetic shock seeing the musicians prepping the strings of their instruments with credit cards. Attractive sounds immediately started to seem obvious and banal to me. It’s a certain paradox, but sometimes the quality of the stream works to the audience’s disadvantage. Dynamic camerawork and rapid montage don’t improve the reception of music at all. The sense of sight deprives music of the element of mystery and understatement. How much can we crop out for the music to remain interesting? After all, the sound of live instruments (or the concert hall’s acoustics and the quality of sound projection) is equally important.
Artists started to search for new means of expression – it’s difficult to demand that they find them within a few weeks. They may not feel comfortable preparing virtual events – the contemporary world creates an illusion of the need for constant presence and continuously marking one’s territory. It’s not only applicable to artists; it’s a problem of all active users of social media – the loss of visibility is counterintuitive, as if one stopped breathing on cue.
Some dealt with it excellently, though. We even presented two such projects, both very different from each other, on Culture.pl. Mikołaj Laskowski composed an interactive piece to be listened to on headphones, in which the listener also becomes the composer. While Maniucha Bikont along with Marcin Wicha created a beautiful, simple song, sat on a couch and sang it while playing the glockenspiel – and it was enough.
On the necessity of words
Marcin Masecki is an artist possessing an astonishing ability of streaming his performances. For years, he’s been talking about his interest in imperfect sounds and promoting all departures from sanitised, hypercorrect renditions. He’s an excellent pianist, whose trademark is flippancy, which sometimes errs close to carelessness. His online concerts included casually inserted stories and talks. In other words, just making conversation – after all, plenty of people lost all authentic human contact and missed such chats terribly.
I find it odd that there were so few casual chats on online streams. I don’t mean extensive, refined panels (though those were missing as well). What I mean is an attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere of cosy meetings with authors: jokes, occasional confessions, honesty. The organisers of Musica Privata festival presented only one son – Ensemble Kompopolex performed Paweł Malinowski’s Imaginarium Polkolor.
After that, we listened to a half-hour talk about the song and the band’s work. Many interesting things were said about interesting issues but those quickly escaped my memory. I will, however, remember Aleksandra Gołaj’s crying son and Jacek Sotomski humming the melody of Koksu Pięć Gram (Five Grams of Coke), which was so popular on social media. It’s a huge blessing of the internet that it enables us to participate in situations like that, but what’s even better is that we can leave when we feel like it and no one will feel offended.
Visuals – what for?
I’m not a huge fan of the use of video in contemporary music – it’s often merely a vessel that doesn’t contribute much to the understanding of the music. It’s necessary to get used to it, as it’s a natural means of expression and an innate part of plenty of composers’ styles. They usually create the visual layer by themselves – they actually don’t have any other options, as they often cannot afford to collaborate with anyone.
This year’s Sacrum Profanum festival took place online. There were no livestreamed concerts, but rather previously prepared musical-filmic forms (even if some performances were styled to resemble real-time concerts). Some of them looked like typical concert recordings, others resembled music videos (TOVA). In some of them, musicians only appeared occasionally, the visual layer being dominant – those would work well as galleries (Performed Lecture). Muzyka i Sport (Music and Sports) was full of close-ups exposing the musicians’ physicality.
Adonis Gamut was something entirely different – Barbara Kinga Majewska’s programme, which, apart from the singer, included Marcin Masecki and the bodybuilder Daniel Poniedziałek. The idea was incredibly simple and easy to execute – a static camera observed the almost motionless artists, everything was illumined with red light. Majewska looked back at the process of learning about music, an attempt to return to practices from one’s youth – something completely unnatural. The red colour referred to the peep show aesthetic and was meant to constitute a gesture showing the intimacy of the practicing process. The ascetic visual form connected with the repetitive, perhaps slightly irritating sounds of rehearsing created a hypnotic, coherent whole.
What the streamed music of 2020 lacked was diligence in using visual forms and a justification for combining music with image. Musicians and composers aren’t visual artists, and if they need to create music with visual elements, they should have someone to collaborate with on them.
Female forms
Most first performances of 2020 went unnoticed. Even pieces by top-of-the-range composers weren’t discussed widely, with the exception of Formy Żeńskie (Female Forms), which was performed during the Warsaw Autumn festival and then, again, virtually during the Sacrum Profanum festival. Composed and played by women, the idea was created by Martyna Zakrzewska, a pianist and a member of the Spółdzielnia Muzyczna (Music Cooperative). We heard pieces by Anna Sowa, Żaneta Rydzewska, Monika Szpyrka, Martyna Kosecka and Teonika Rożynek. It wasn’t a topical concert. We heard a varied, yet coherent programme. All the composers share a similar sensitivity to sounds of errors, defects and cracks.
The audience mainly commented on Sugar, Spice & All Things Nice by Nina Fukuoki. It’s not the music that was discussed but the lyrics – the composer made use of her friends’ confessions regarding the violence they experienced during their education and in their careers. Inappropriate comments, criticising their appearances, humiliation, attempts at forced physical contact, rape jokes... One week after Warsaw Autumn, descriptions of the traumatic experiences of actresses from the Gardzienice Theatre appeared in the media, and feminist demonstrations took place a week before Sacrum Profanum.
I think that in 2021, well mainly be listen to music created by and performed by women.
The presence of the absent
Contemporary culture and society pushes death out of our daily life. The pandemic forces us to confront out mortality – every day we follow the statistics of COVID-19 cases and deaths. We feel compassion for those who lost their loved ones, or we ourselves grieve for someone. Paradoxically, at the same time, we’re even more detached from death. Due to the epidemiological threat, we cannot say goodbye to those who are dying. Only a limited number of people can participate in funerals...
On 29th March 2020 at 6.30am, one of the most prominent composers in the history of Polish music, Krzysztof Penderecki passed away in Kraków (the cause of death wasn’t coronavirus-related). Various artists from all over the world bid him goodbye on social media –contemporary composers, creators of experimental, alternative and popular music, visual artists and filmmakers, as well as diplomats from around the globe. Nevertheless, one cannot say that we had to opportunity to properly bid farewell to Maestro Penderecki. His family participated in the requiem mass but a funeral still hasn’t taken place. A funeral ceremony will be organised after the pandemic ends.
The urn with the composer’s ashes will be placed in a vault of the National Pantheon in the St Peter and St Paul Church in Kraków. He’ll be only the second – after writer Stanisław Mrożek – representative of the arts buried in the National Pantheon, which was created in 2012. He will rest with prominent mathematicians and chemists, as well as the priests Piotr Skarga and Andrzej Trzebicki, the Bishop of Kraków, and the Crown Deputy Chancellor, the founder of Dom pod Łabędziem (Swan House) – the first shelter for the mentally ill on Polish lands. Penderecki will be the second composer commemorate with such honours by the Polish state beside Karol Szymanowski, who was buried in the Krypta Zasłużonych (Crypt of Merit) at Skałka in Kraków.
Penderecki said that he had written Polish Requiem with hope, using lyrics which would help one believe that death isn’t the end – that’s why the finale involves light and hope. The extraordinary oeuvre of the revolutionist who loved tradition deeply will yield tonnes of comments, tributes and polemics. I believe that Penderecki’s music will keep returning to us for many years to come in the form of countless interpretations and reinterpretations. Kicking off these initiatives, the Adam Mickiewicz Institute released the album Responses to the Master, which includes compositions by Paweł Romańczuk, Robert Piotrowicz and the Skalpel duo, inspired by the master from Lusławice.
Although Henryk Mikołaj Górecki hasn’t been with us for ten years already, his music keeps reverberating in new ways. Goodbye Mr. Górecki by Ewa Liebchen is one of the most interesting albums devoted to the Silesian composer. Górecki’s pieces for flute have never achieved great popularity, even though it was one of his favourite instruments. The album includes three compositions by Górecki: Dla Ciebie, Anne-Lill (For You, Anne-Lill), Dobranoc (Goodnight) and Valentine Piece. Apart from Liebchen playing the flute, on the album we hear Emilia Karolina Sitarz, Barbara Kinga Majewska and Hubert Zemler – it’s difficult to imagine a more interesting and unique band. The last track is Good Luck, written by Zemler as a farewell to Górecki – a lullaby in warm tones, devoid of pathos.
Bogusław Schaeffer, who passed away in 2019, also left a huge body of work – over 500 compositions, dozens of theatrical plays and graphic works. Many of his pieces haven’t been recorded yet, they don’t exist in live versions either. He was a real visionary – the audience will probably fully appreciate his art in a hundred or two-hundred years. Provided, of course, that humanity will still exist then.
Perhaps the Bogusław Schaeffer Institute will be established by a highly developed civilisation of aliens, who will occupy themselves with exploring Earth’s music culture? Or maybe such an institute already exists? Today we can certainly say that, thanks to the joint effort of Aurea Porta Foundation and Bôłt Records, the album Dialogues was released, containing songs for piano (or, sometimes, two pianos). Moreover, the Matmos duo, in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and Ableton, created a sample library out of Schaeffer’s works from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio.
The year 2020 also marked Mieczysław Weinberg’s symbolic return to Warsaw. Thanks to the Mieczysław Weinberg Institute, a memorial plaque was hung on Chwil Gerkowicz’s townhouse at 66 Żelazna Street, where the prominent Polish Jewish Russian composer was born. He left his homeland in 1939. The number of people who remember the pre-war Poland keeps decreasing from year to year – we are losing our memory. Thankfully, the history of Polish Jews is increasingly more present on albums and in concert programmes, but tangible symbols of our history are necessary as well. I hope that we will manage to keep more Polish Jewish musicians and composers’ memories alive for future generations.
Originally written in Polish, translated by AWP Dec 2020
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