The creative and media strategies of Polish composers were strongly influenced by the political situation of their country, occupied by foreign powers for a long time. The patriotic engagement which Polish society demanded from its artists, enabled some composers and their texts to reach media spaces beyond the field of art. The interactions between patriotism and artistic self-promotion are analyzed at the example of the writings of Polish composers from the time before and after the renaissance of the Polish state in 1918. Whereas before this caesura music and the discourse about it often served as means for political purposes (especially in the case of Ignacy Jan Paderewski), the opposite is to be observed in the 1920s when Karol Szymanowski did not hesitate to instrumentalize nationalist feelings in order to promote his own new aesthetics as a sort of “liberation” from the yoke of 19th-century Germanic music.