Sound

Chapter 1 lays out the tension between ideas about music’s political efficacy and the productive work that sound did for the opposition in Poland. Within the intellectual community that shaped much of dissident culture, poets, filmmakers, and actors were more engaged with politics than composers and musical performers. To understand the logic behind claims that music was less politically meaningful, the chapter compares the Communist Party’s policies toward music with those debated in the oppositional journal Independent Culture. In contrast, the opposition’s cassette culture circumvented the Censorship Bureau and stumped secret police surveillance, revealing the powerful political potential of sound. Its founders were invested in tape contra print as well as cassettes’ transnational distribution and alternative economies. Listening to these cassettes as sounding artifacts reveals diverse repertories and creative editing techniques that belie the assumption that music was politically impotent for the opposition.