title: Wind bands in Poland c. 1800-1939
Creators: name: Kierzkowski, Maciej
Publisher: name: The Open University
Year: 2024

description: This thesis aims to identify how wind bands in Poland developed from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Bands are explored against the background, and from the point of view, of ongoing geopolitical, social, and economic change, as well as in the context of innovations implemented to brass instruments. This thesis is based largely on primary written sources, such as military regulations, legislative documents, original press releases, printed sheet music, and correspondence – with most of this not investigated previously in music scholarship. A chronological overview of bands in Poland is first provided, with the various themes explored in relation to early wind bands of both a military and civilian nature, foreign influences, bandmasters and players, instrumentation, performing conventions, and repertoire. Certain of the identified themes are then followed up in far greater detail in further parts of the thesis. It uncovers how the several traditions characterising Polish military bands of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evolved into the more homogeneous musical idiom of the ensembles attached to military units of the Second Republic of Poland (1918-1939), with socio-musical roles played as regards representation, democratisation, and nationalisation, and with an impact on the development of the music profession also exerted. This thesis then exposes the ways in which various kinds of civilian wind bands originated and developed, against the background of the cultural expansion of new social classes emerging along with industrialisation and modernisation, the social policy pursued by the Roman Catholic Church in regard to Polish patriotism and nationalism, and individual economic and educational benefits that did most to motivate players’ involvement in musical activity. The thesis then seeks to account for the emergence of bands of the Voluntary Fire Brigades in the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and for the ways in which these developed into the more unified and centrally coordinated socio-musical phenomenon of the firefighting band movement in Interwar Poland, while being influenced by Polish patriotism and nationalism as well as by economic motives relating to more general social activity characterising firefighters. Certain specific themes relating to bands in Poland are uncovered, with the thesis exploring ways in which progress in the manufacturing of wind instruments led to this becoming a significant sector of local music industry. Equally, the innovations implemented in brass instruments combined with ongoing militarisation to exert a modernising influence on bands’ instrumental configurations. Information and insight is further supplied here on why and how local standardised types of instrumentation developed in relation to various foreign traditions in military music (above all those of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and France) and professional recommendations that influenced both the Warsaw-based music publishing market and the post-Great War military regulations binding for bands. Finally, by examining the preserved repertoire sources, this thesis sheds light on the role military influences played, as well as on the intended purposes of wind band music, in terms of both its production and its contribution to the cultural reintegration of a newly independent Poland, back on the map of Europe post-1918.