Etnomuzykolog w terenie a metodyka i technika – rys historyczny

Phonographic sources documenting the repertoire and performance practice of Polish traditional music have been systematically collected for almost a century. The oldest vintage recordings date back to the beginning of the previous century, while the first institutional archives were created only in the 1930s. Thanks to the work of many generations of scholars, mainly ethnomusicologists, despite the war damages we have access to a vast and continually broadened source material, still not sufficiently studied and only partially published. The text aimed to look at the history of the formation of ethnophonographic and video sources in terms of its technique, which has been dynamically changing in the last decades, and in terms of the development and transformation of fieldwork methods which to this day have not been re-examined and standardized with respect to the study of Polish traditional music. The article briefly discusses the history of Polish documentary ethnophonography, focusing on the description of the process of searching for, selecting, adjusting and changing the methods of source materials acquisition for ethnomusicological studies. The final chapter is an attempt to describe the situation of a contemporary “ethnomusicologist in the field” (within the Polish context) who, with over a century of field research experiences and methods, is faced with a dynamically and radically changing research topic in the context of societal and cultural transformation – predominantly regarding the technologies and tools the researcher can use. Within this framework, it is necessary to reflect on the future of this research discipline, its methods and tools, and to confront (as well as modify – in the required scope) the previously developed and tested methods of fieldwork with the realities of the 21st century.