Hi-Fi Heritage: Recording Technology, Audio Engineering, and the Mediation of Authenticity in the Polish Revival of Traditional Music

Although sound recording technologies have been central to the genesis and popularization of music revival movements, rarely have these technologies been treated as objects of analysis in their own right. In this article, I consider three recent albums released by Polish traditional music revivalists and examine how audio-engineering practices create and perpetuate socially constructed notions of authenticity based in real or sonically produced connections to the rural past. Each album illustrates a different strategy of sonically suggesting and reproducing the music’s traditional authenticity by 1) adding ambient environmental sounds, 2) creating mechanical audio distortions, and 3) incorporating archival recordings of past performers. These sound-engineering practices buck long-established aesthetic standards of high-fidelity sound in order to perpetuate revivalists’ definition of authenticity as based on a real or perceived connection to pre-1950s, rural Poland. As a case study, Polish revivalist albums confirm the spatial and temporal basis of authenticity discourse in revivalist ideology and illustrate the ideology’s flexibility in adapting to changing audio technologies. Furthermore, I suggest that sound-engineering practices can help revivalist movements’ transition from a salvage mode of activism that preserves endangered musics to a living, dynamic mode that embraces change as a central element of traditions’ social continuity and future viability.