Central & Eastern Europe

In addition to autonomous pieces of music, the Experimental Studio at the Polish Radio in Warsaw produced incidental music for radio broadcasts and soundtracks for movies and TV.

Listen to 23 music compositions created at Polish Radio Experimental Studio by both the foreign and local composers. Starting with Kotoński’s Study, the first autonomous piece of music for tape produced at PRES in 1959, the presented selection leads through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Since completing her studies in printmaking in Budapest in the late 1950s, Dora Maurer has emerged as one of Eastern Europe’s most rigorously experimental artists of the past fifty years. Her work has alternated fluidly between process-based printmaking experiments and mark-making procedures that favor indeterminable outcomes, on the one hand, and, on the other, formal…

Producing sound effects for radio, film, and television propagated new trends in audio art. Whereas concerts of autonomous music organized by Polish Radio attracted audiences of a few dozen people, popular new movies pulled in far larger crowds.

A galaxy of published materials related to PRES

The word feminism was the subject of a public conversation that took place on November 18, 2014, at MoMA. Under the heading “Translating Feminism,” Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Agata Jakubowska, and Gayatri Sinha discussed the term’s implications for artistic practice in their respective areas of scholarship. In Latin America, Fajardo-Hill argued, feminism has often been regarded as a bourgeois…

Moją specjalnością były filmy o miłości, o macierzyństwie, śmierci, martyrologii czy funeralnym świecie, ilustrowane muzyką konkretną. Ja zilustruję w moim warsztacie dowolny film na dowolny temat. Chciałem wygenerować czy wynaleźć, wymyślić dźwięki, których cechą jest to, że dotąd nigdy nie zaistniały, nie dają żadnych skojarzeń, bo jak ktoś bierze muzykę instrumentalną, to natychmiast słuchacz widzi…

Eugeniusz Rudnik—a lifelong sound engineer of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio—speaks about the early years of Polish electroacoustic music, about his distrust of both musical scores and the deceptive idea of musical and artistic progress, and about the fine line between sound engineer and composer.

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. Depending on the type of recording, the whole apparatus changes like a…

Browse scans of the complete music scores co-published by the Polish Radio Experimental Studio below and read the essay “Alchemist Cabinet of the Polish Radio Experimental Studio: Music Scores of and for Experiments” to learn more.

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.

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 as a key catalyst for avant-garde exploration and production.