Commentary on classical music in the Polish national and regional media

Abstract

The author analyses commentaries on classical music in the Polish media. She indicates that this kind of journalism appears rarely in the broad-range press, on the radio and on television, but that it plays an important role in culture and music press. As far as the broadcast media are concerned, it appears mainly in the public media. The author analyses selected press titles, their genres and content. She observes that the functions of press are more and more often adopted by the Internet (the Internet fora or musical blogs). The restricted number of commentary genres is transparent in press articles, while reviews and interviews are most frequent. The authors of these texts are often inexperienced and lack appropriate education. One of the reasons of the limitations of the music commentary is that the articles and programmes seem interesting only to a small group of receivers, and the senders are subject to conditions of the free market and conform to the most common tastes. Therefore, when analysing this issue, the receiver’s perspective seems very important. Media interest in music commentary depends on the receivers’ cultural activity, and this activity depends on the level of general education and music culture in the country. Polish music tradition is much weaker than in many other countries, such as Germany. The abandonment of musical commentary would be unfavourable, because such journalism plays many important functions, such as culture- and opinion-making functions.