Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Dluga 26/28
00-950 Warsaw skr. 994
Poland
phone:
+48 22 50 48 275
eMail:
jacek.jackowski@ispan.pl
web:
www.ispan.pl
Contacts
Associate Prof. Ewa Dahlig-Turek, Dr. Habil.
Deputy Director
Jacek Jackowski, M.A.
Curator
The archive of the Institute of Arts of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw is the oldest and largest collection of folk music recordings in Poland - the oldest recordings are two wax cylinders with wedding speeches from the South of Poland, recorded in 1904 by Roman Zawilinski (see examples 1 and 2).
The ISPAN collection is a descendant of two Polish folk music archives from the interwar period.
In 1930 Łucjan Kamienski, a professor of musicology at the Poznan University, founded the Regional Phonogram Archive (RAF). Kamienski and his students, among them Jadwiga and Marian Sobieski, the leading Polish ethnomusicologists after the World War II, did intensive field work. The collection of around 4020 recordings of folk songs and instrumental music was most probably destroyed in 1939-40. Copies of twenty-three cylinders (currently held in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv) are the only remnants of this collection.
Another important institution of the inter-war period was the Central Phonogram Archive at the Polish National Library in Warsaw. Established in 1934 and headed by Julian Pulikowski, the archive made about 20.000 recordings on 4850 cylinders, as at 1939. In September 1944 Pulikowski was killed in the Warsaw uprising and in November the whole collection was burnt.
After the end of World War II the documentation of Polish folk music began again from the beginning. In 1945 Marian Sobieski and Tadeusz Wrotkowski established the Western Phonogram Archive in Poznan. The collection of 420 decelith plates (examples 3 and 4) featuring recordings from Wielkopolska (Great Poland) was absorbed by the newly-founded Institute of Art (1949).
The repository grew bigger in 1950-1954, when the Folklore Collecting Campaign took place. 300 recordists made around 46,000 recordings from all over Poland. Together with the decelith plates, they constitute the oldest part of the ISPAN sound archive.
In 1959 the Institute of Arts was incorporated into the Polish Academy of Sciences and it remains within its structure till today.
The archive includes about 13,000 reel-tapes (half of which are original field- recordings), about 200 minidiscs and a new section of video recordings. Sound collection is completed by the large section of music-related documents (manuscripts, letters, journals and photos connected to the filed research).
Recordings concentrate on Polish folk music (examples 5, 6 and 7), with some representation of immigrants from former Eastern regions of Poland (Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania), as well as minorities living in Poland (Lithuanians, Belarussians, Ukrainians, Jews, gypsies). Apart from music performances, different forms of spoken information have also been recorded (orations, wedding speeches, interviews about music life and customs, etc.). Vocal repertoire is prevailing, representing all the possible genres. Instrumental recordings (mostly dance tunes) make up about twenty-five percent of the content.
Tasks of the archive are closely bound to the tasks of the ISPAN Music Department and consist of:
With approximately 130,000 recordings of songs and instrumentals, the archive is a true national treasure of Polish folk music, and in many cases the only source of knowledge of the vanished tradition.
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