The Polish electronic music revolution of the 1950s

It was created in November 1957, a year before the BBC’s fabled Radiophonic Workshop, and was far more influential in shaping the development of electronic music, yet the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) is now virtually unknown even in Poland. Radio 3’s feature on Sunday night, Poles Apart (produced by Andrew Carter), made the case for its significance, taking us back to those early days of analogue bleeps, bongs, blurps and squelches. Robert Worby and the eerily electronic undercurrent to the programme gave us a completely new perspective on what else was going on in Poland in the 1960s besides the trouble at the Gdansk shipyards and the suppression of political thought.

Housed in a drab, high-security building with armed guards at the door, the home of state-run Polish Radio seemed an unlikely place for extraordinary invention. But, says Worby, the Black Room studio, so-called because of its black walls, was ‘a powerhouse of music… and a cultural beacon,’ providing the soundscape of countless sci-fi and animation films that have been watched around the world. Packed with bulky machines and glowing valves, the studio brought together composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and Nigel Osborne who were given the freedom to experiment; indeed were encouraged to do so.

The studio was abandoned in 2004, although its machines still survive as a reminder of analogue’s innovations. By telling the story of PRES, Worby, a composer himself, set out to prove that there is always another truth beneath the surface if you’re prepared to listen, to pay attention. Under the sullen carapace of communism, Polish technicians and musicians developed a completely new sound world.

Just in time for Remembrance, Tania Hershman’s programme for Radio 4, Who Will Call Me Beloved? (produced by Faith Lawrence), took us inside the huge Southern Cemetery in Manchester (said to be the second largest in Europe) to remember the dead.