📜 Kotula, Franciszek. 1979. Muzykanty [Musicians]. Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza.
This book is written in Polish. It is available as PDF from an official source:
https://msf.muzeumetnograficzne.rzeszow.pl/ebook
and also at web.archive.org.
The work's start is very strong by the virtue of citing Huizinga's Homo Ludens in the introduction from the ethnographer Józef Burszta. Later though it's clear that the book is peripheral to our topics. In the broadest strokes these are stories about folk musicians from the area of Rzeszów (Resovia, a city in South-Eastern Poland). The first part of the book is narrated by the author and the second part consists of memoirs acquired from the musicians themselves, abbreviated and annotated by Kotula. While the method of the second part is clear, the author, despite being a "serious" ethnographer, made the first part intentionally narrative, without much of typical attribution and sourcing history.
Some recurring themes throughout the book are:
- magical beliefs and practices related to this profession — including the rituals in which musicians took part as accompanists, methods of guarding against competition in the business, and "devil's gift" aura of the most skilled players,
- aesthetic preferences and considerations of folk performers, and
- local differences between the villages — folk musicians were on average more travelled members of their communities, different vocabularies or customs lead to many anecdotes, especially around who needs to pay when and for what.
The most frequently appearing activity of interest from our narrow point of view will be "przyśpiewka", a word surprisingly missing from the Cambridge Polish-English Dictionary, although commonly known in all country, which may sometimes be translated as "chant" or "couplet". It's a short song that may be sung to a known or improvised melody, generally humorous, often bitingly directed at a chosen participant of the event. The aspect of improvisation and also competition involved is mentioned especially at p. 226 in the story relayed from Józef Szura of Bieśnik. Nevertheless, the in-the-moment creation of przyśpiewka may be understood rather as exceptional — having a broad repertoire of songs ready for adaptation was more popular.
One of the musicians, Jan Kisała, engages with the geographic comparisons directly in the memoir, doing an overview of locations. This included this amusing quote (p. 346), without naming names in this case:
There were villages where we played, where a finale with a brawl was a rule. Without a brawl something seemed missing and everyone felt awkward.
| Manor in Hadle Szklarskie, Januszk57, CC BY-SA 3.0 PL |
Kisała reports an interesting game-adjacent activity on two occasions, one from Rzeki (p. 345) and also from around the villages of Hadle (p. 355). The band used to go to every guest at the wedding reception, one by one, to play a song chosen by the guest. It may be a known piece, but more often it involved repeating the melody after the guest and arranging it on the spot. As is often the case, the difficulty of the task scales with the amount of alcohol consumed, and payment depended on success — it was one of the few ways how the cost of music was shared between participants of ceremonies.
Book's afterword by Jadwiga Sobieska adds some academic context and some interesting details too, e.g. we can learn the story about how one of the diarists, Paweł Kalinka, got to be an inspiration for Witold Lutosławski.
As per usual, parts that have not been written by folk musicians have somewhat of a reference point in "professional" music, with its "proper" violin technique, etc. Luckily this is not overly obnoxious and paternalistic, and more of an assumption about the reader — but you may easily enjoy the book even if folk music is closer to you than classical.
(*) About the word in the title
The title needs to be translated as "musicians", but it provides more detailed meaning. Firstly, the basic "musician" in Polish is "muzyk" with "muzykant", in some contexts derogatory, points to self-taught players of rural origin. Another thing is a non-standard plural form, which usually would be "muzykanci". Here, the used "non-personified", again sometimes derogatory, version, is yet more stylising hinting at a non-specific rural dialect.
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