Andrea F. Bohlman. <i>Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland</i>

Much has been written about the last decade of Communism in Eastern Europe and, in particular, about the events in Poland that played a crucial role in its fall. However, there is not much work available that examines the history of oppositional political activity from the perspective of sound and music studies. Andrea F. Bohlman’s book imagines what it would be like to close our eyes and use only our ears to navigate the turbulent Solidarity period in Poland, mapping the military clamor that dominated the streets after martial law was imposed, the protest songs sung by amateurs and celebrated bards, the anthems so often intoned by striking shipyard workers, and the symphonies commemorating the martyrs of the opposition. All this, fortunately, can be done by the readers themselves, since—in addition to the illustrations in the book—excerpts of the recordings referred to are also available on the book’s companion website provided by Oxford University Press (without which the work’s reception would undoubtedly be limited).1Bohlman’s work is a particularly innovative experiment also because the Cold War period is often seen as the peak of written culture, defined by the massive production of various documents that inevitably overshadowed the study of other media for a long time. A parallel feature is that it is usually the uncensored literature (samizdat) that is generally regarded as the main medium of dissident voices during the Cold War rather than the microphone or the cassette tape—a picture that Bohlman’s book considerably nuances. With its focus on noise, sound, and melody, and its emphasis on performativity, musicality, and orality, this work offers “a music history of a social movement” (6).As Bohlman puts it, “Musical Solidarities developed out of a stubborn attempt to hear history out of cassette tapes” (xiii). Fortunately, Bohlman used her other senses as well when writing the book. In addition to the various sound archives, the author has reviewed numerous written sources—including, in particular, publications of the Polish “second circulation” (the so-called drugi obieg), private, and state archives—and even conducted ethnographic research among the living eyewitnesses to the time. The corpus of materials included in the study is thus quite broad and varied, allowing the author to present both the multiplicity of nonconformist cultural scenes and the different contexts, pre-, and posthistories of the various musical and sound phenomena.The book is an interconnected collection of case studies, divided into six major chapters. Bohlman discusses the events not in chronological order but according to musical concepts that, in the author’s words, “intersected with, generated, and fractured the opposition’s culture” (18). It is also worth adding that the order of the chapters does not follow some kind of teleological logic but instead conceptualizes the ways in which music and oppositional activity related to each other.The first chapter seeks to explore sound from two angles: through the strategies, dissemination mechanisms, networks, and alternative economy of the second public sphere on the one hand, and through official statements of the party documents on the other. The author analyzes Stefan Bratkowski’s Sound Gazette project: a series of uncensored broadcast cassette tapes, consisting of editorial monologues that parody official language and are supplemented by bards’ songs, which, as Bohlman puts it, position “listening as a means of participating in oppositional discourse” (25). From this perspective, the world of the drugi obieg stands in sharp contrast to what can be read in party documents, especially those cultural efforts under party supervision that instrumentalized music and sound, often in a failure-by-failure manner, for the sake of socialist propaganda and political efficiency.The second chapter maps the soundscape that emerged after the introduction of martial law in December 1981. The title of the chapter—“Silence”—captures the nature of the measures taken by new leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski (information blackout, telephone cuts) and the shock of martial law, which made military force “a social metaphor of silence in public memory” (68). But Bohlman’s research reveals that even in this silence, songs were sung and voices articulated as a reaction against the “normality” of silence or the monotonous noise of military technology. Bohlman points out that, among the bards or those interned by the Jaruzelski regime, singing—the individual and communal use of songs—became a means of processing trauma and preserving memory.The chapter entitled “Protest” focuses on the role played by voices, hymns, and protest songs in the Lenin Shipyards, among the striking workers, asking to what extent music coordinated and energized political action. By discussing these questions, Bohlman seeks to reinterpret the relationship between political activism and music as being “in constant dynamic tension” (112), indicating that their performative energy and agency is rooted in “the social space of communication” (120). Bohlman also emphasizes that recording (the traces of which were typically transferred to the print media as well) was a common practice during the strikes, so that the highly mediatized soundscape of the Polish strikes established the narrative of local events as an authentic historical narrative for both Polish and foreign audiences. By deconstructing the reception of Jacek Kaczmarski and his “Walls,” which became the iconic song of the Solidarity movement, Bohlman also points to the fault lines between the iconic status of the song and the pessimistic vision anticipated in its lyrics.The fourth chapter focuses on the voice and memory—or rather, the mediatized afterlife—of the Catholic priest Jerzy Popiełuszko. Father Popiełuszko, who served as chaplain at Saint Stanislaus Kostka Parish in Warsaw, became popular for his “Masses for the Fatherland” and his criticism of the Jaruzelski regime during the martial law, until he was murdered by Polish security service agents in October 1984. The chaplain’s martyrdom played a major role in the persistence of Polish crises as transnational media events in the 1980s. Moreover, Popiełuszko’s death also created a community of mourners through the technologization of his voice. Following the thesis of Walter J. Ong, who foregrounds and endows sacral meanings to orality, Bohlman explores how Solidarity’s various communities created a sound mysterium out of Popiełuszko’s voice. It is no coincidence that Bohlman’s study also focuses on commemorative rituals: in particular, the reenactment of Popiełuszko’s funeral in 2009 and the musical works dedicated to Popiełuszko by the British electronic musician Bryn Jones and two Polish composers, Krzysztof Knittel and Andrzej Panufnik. What is particularly moving is that in Bryn Jones’s music—according to Bohlman’s interpretation—Popiełuszko’s death is reenacted, the rhythm echoing the deadly blows received by the priest, while the darkness of the music absorbs Popiełuszko’s voice.If the fourth chapter shows that Popiełuszko’s voice had a performative power in more than one sense (it was itself an act while also calling for action), the fifth chapter, entitled “Megaphon,” treats the voice as agency. In this chapter, which focuses on the question of representation, the megaphone plays a key role, both metaphorically and in practice: as a technological apparatus capable of distinguishing certain voices from the cacophony, of bringing together and representing the voices of the masses oppressed by the communist authorities, or of “embodying” the victims of state repression. In this chapter, Bohlman analyzes both the dramaturgy of the commemoration of the ten-year anniversary of the massacre of workers in December 1970, including the orchestration and reception of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Lacrimosa,” and the various performances of the ballad “Janek Wiśniewski Fell.” At the end of the chapter, Bohlman returns to Lech Wałęsa, whose “voice amplified the people” (233), and examines how the unofficial leader of the masses received external, musical support through the songs of Joan Baez. More precisely, the American singer galvanized her audiences—and turned them into a chorus—to reaffirm Wałęsa’s leadership.Baez, who also made the audience sing, provides an excellent bridge to the final chapter, entitled “Chorus.” Bohlman seeks to understand the practices of opposition singing primarily by evoking the world of street protests. Above all, the chapter focuses on hymn singing, which “gives acoustic form to shared history” (241), while bearing in mind that hymns can also be understood as polysemic texts “through which national identity is constantly being negotiated.”2 Bohlman presents a kaleidoscope of performances of the hymn “God Save Poland” between 1977 and 1989, showing that the song’s communal use and its many performances were based above all on its flexibility and adaptability. However, Bohlman’s last example, which takes us forward to the present, also shows how the noises surrounding the hymn, deconstructing its function of creating and uniting community, may become more important than the hymn itself.In summary, Bohlman's (context-)sensitive analysis, her wide-ranging attention, critical approach, and the rich contexts she presents reveal exciting, often hidden dimensions of the Polish opposition movement. The author’s distinctly interdisciplinary work undoubtedly complicates and remixes history—reading the book, one gets the feeling that a complex, “multi-octave” history speaks to us in the language of music, sounds, and noises.

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