Polish Independence Songbook
Polish Heritage Foundation Project

Polish Independence Songbook | Śpiewnik Niepodległości is a multimedia, historical and educational portal of patriotic songs. The purpose of this interactive portal is to make digital cultural resources accessible and re-usable by publicizing, free of charge, the fullest possible output of Polish patriotic and military songs, and anthems. For each of the pieces made available on the website www.spiewnikniepodleglosci.pl a musical and educational self-study packet has been prepared, which includes:
– a description of the work and an analysis, interpretation and historical context,
– the text of the piece with musical notes and guitar chords,
– underscores (melody, melody with metronome, melody with accompaniment and accompaniment),
– recordings of works in contemporary arrangements and the original compositions of the Koncert Niepodległości (Polish Independence Concert) group.

In the year 2022, thanks to the funding received from the state budget, as part of the competition announced by the Minister of the Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland „Public Diplomacy 2022”, Foundation initialized a project of for an English-language version of the portal. Users of the portal www.polishindependencesongbook.com can learn the historical and literary contexts of the songs, browse multimedia galleries, use translations of the song lyrics, their respective notes and chords, backing tracks and recordings, which, through their unique hybrid arrangements, inspire users to study and to make themselves familiar with Polish music. Next to each song there are free downloads in English, links to all resources available for any given song, and recommendations regarding other songs and content made available in the service’s database. Both language versions of the portal are accessible to people with disabilities in accordance with the international WCAG standard and use Progressive Web Application (PWA) technology. This solution combines the best features of web browsers and native mobile applications. As the users views successive suppages, the content they have viewed is cached on their device. Thanks to this mechanism, previously visited resources become available to the user even without direct Internet access.

As part of the further development of the Polish Independence Songbook, it is planned to conduct translations and interpretations, as well as to prepare historical and musical materials for all songs in the database of the Polish version of the website. The Foundation would also like to prepare the functions of playlist and songbook creator for foreign language users of the portal as well as a full-text search engine, which will support the English language.