Musical performances in the illustrations of the collections of Polish folk songs published in the 1940s and 1950s

Abstract

The subject of the article are figures accompanying the songs (melodies and verbal texts) in the published collections. They present folk art motifs, instruments, individual musicians or bands. The illustrations, in addition to their purely decorative function, were to refer to the folk music tradition of the regions from which the songs or instrumental melodies contained in the collection came from. However, they are more artistic than substantive. Probably the illustrators did not know the regional specificity of Polish musical folklore, its diversity in this respect. They also did not know the structure of the presented instruments, in the sense of: construction details or the way they were held while playing, or they “creatively” modified these features. Probably for this reason, the music scenes are shown as the artist saw them through the prism of his own artistic personality, and not as they actually looked.