(Swed.: ‘Polish’ [dance]; Dan. polsk dans; Nor. pols).
A Scandinavian folkdance. It dates from the Renaissance, with its roots in Polish folk choruses and dance pairs. Versions of it occur at all levels of societies and fall into two groups – those in its modern metre (C, C, 2/4) and those in its archaic metre (3/4, 3/8). Some archaic polskas are of interest as prototypes of the Polonaise.
The polska entered the mainstream of European dance history in the first half of the 16th century. Under the influence of the allemande, it developed into both duple- and triple-time versions, which then each had separate historical developments. It did not however become a movement in the Renaissance and Baroque suite but remained in the vanguard of creative dance composition in Poland, Hungary and Germany, as seen in the work of Mikołaj z Krakowa and Wojciech Długoraj, the lute intabulations of Matthäus Waissel and the organ intabulations of Jan z Lublina, August Nörmiger and Christoph Loeffelholz von Colberg. Polskas for dancing are also found in the works of Hans Neusidler and Philipp Hainhofer.
The polska spread to the North Sea region in the 17th and 18th centuries as a result of close contacts between Poland and Sweden when both countries were ruled by the Vasa dynasty (from 1587). Despite its foreign origins the polska, with a rhythm similar to that of the mazurka (ex.1), came to be considered one of the most characteristically national folkdances of Sweden (see Sweden, §II). Among the earliest to be written down are the 85 polskas, mostly for fiddle and collected in Österergötland and Småland, brought together by Johan Wallmann (1792–1853). The polska was popular in all the Scandinavian countries. Polskas were noted down in Norway by the civil servant Hans Kamstrup (1788–1844). In Finland the word ‘polska’ refers more broadly to couple- and group-dances in 3/4.
T. Norlind: ‘Zur Geschichte der polnischen Tänze’, SIMG, xii (1910–11), 501
H.G. Nielssen: Vore aeldste folkedanse (Copenhagen, 1917)
K. Semb: Norske folkedansar (Oslo, 1946–61)
E. Ala-Könni: Die Polska-Tänze in Finnland (Helsinki, 1956)
J. Krogsaeter: Folk Dancing in Norway (Oslo, 1968)
M. Jersild: ‘Tre polskesamlingar från början av 1800-talet’ [Three collections of polskas from the early 19th century], Sumlen, i (1976), 36–66
M. Ramsten: ‘Hurven: en polska och dess miljö’ [Hurven: a polska and its milieu], Sumlen, i (1976), 67–155
M. Jersild: ‘Norska polskor upptecknade av Hans Kamstrup' [Norwegian polskas noted down by Hans Kamstrup’, Sumlen, ii (1977), 66–70
K.-P. Koch: ‘Der polnische Tanz in Ostseeraum es 17./18. Jahrhunderts’, Musica baltica: Greifswald 1993, 125–35
FRANTIŠEK BONUŠ/R