Ethnic Folk Music Archive from Poland & Eastern Europe - Masters of the Polish Accordion. Triumph and defeat.

Music Lost/Found
Masters of the Polish Accordion. Triumph and defeat.
Ethnic folk music from Eastern Europe (Poland)
Recordings from Andrzej Bienkowski's archives from years 2003-2007
www.musiclostfound.com

Label / Muzyka Odnaleziona, Poland (2010)
Catalogue No / 010
Format / Book with CD
Book / 48 pages, size 15 X 14 cm (5.5" x 5.9"), hard cover binding, in Polish language, many photos with detailed description.
CD / 28 tracks, total time 62 min 4 seconds

Masters of the Accordion. Triumph and defeat.

This book and accompanying CD is dedicated to accordionists working in the Polish countryside after 1945. The accordionists changed traditional wedding custom by widening their repertoires and introducing new instruments. The result of this was the gradual elimination of traditional ceremonial music; modern pop hits replaced the mazurka and oberek. The unification process of rural and city music had begun. In the 1950s a band consisted of a concertina or accordion, fiddle, saxophone or trumpet and a basic drum kit.  From 1930 to 1950 Poland was a major producer of Polish accordions, with hundreds of workshops devoted to concertina manufacture and repair; today only a few remain. The Polish accordion era has ended. Something is changing, however. Young people are tentatively picking up accordion and learning to play. This is a brave step, considering that not so long ago accordions were contemptuously dubbed “radiators” by the younger generation.

Andrzej Bienkowski

About Music Lost/Found Series

Poland, 1980, and Communism is facing collapse. Petrol is being rationed, the shops are empty. I begin my journey through the countryside to record music. It’s strange, because there are a great many folk bands, but their services are no longer required in the villages or towns. Musicians stop playing and sell off their instruments; slowly but surely they are forgotten. The first difficulty we faced was finding them replacement instruments. I met musicians who hadn’t seen each other in years, having once played weddings together regularly; this was the last generation of village musicians. Then came the dawn of the pop era. We filmed and made unique music recordings in the musicians’ homes, which were natural, stress-free environments. We searched throughout Poland, Ukraine and Belarus and found 1500 musicians, as well as singers, and from this number we reconstructed eighty bands. Our archive contains recordings of some of the oldest village bands, as well as contemporary wedding music. We have thousands of field photographs. However, the real jewels in our collection are undoubtedly the photographs taken by the original village photographers, who faithfully captured weddings, parties, funerals and daily life.

Andrzej Bienkowski

Andrzej Bienkowski is a painter, ethnographer, writer and professor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. For the last thirty years he has traversed rural Poland to document and record the music of village fiddlers, accordionists and singers. He has produced many books and films about rural Polish music, including the Music Lost & Found series. He owns the largest private collection of rural music in Poland.