During the second half of the 1960s and well into the 1970s, most Polish composers went through further stages of reassessment and reorientation after having achieved their initial modus vivendi with avant-garde music from Western Europe and America. In some cases, such adjustments can be marked by specific compositions and dates – Górecki's Refrain (1965) and Ad matrem (1971), Penderecki's St Luke Passion (1966) and First Violin Concerto (1976), or Lutosławski's Livre (1968) and Epitaph (1979). For other composers, the process was more gradual although sometimes equally radical. And for some, change was minimal: Baird and Serocki, for example, were but two of the Polish modernists who maintained their dedication to the ideals which they had espoused in the early 1960s.

A substantial number of other composers, mainly those born in the inter-war years, maintained active contact with aspects of Polish modernism while at the same time making stylistic modifications or softening their tone. Dobrowolski and Kotoński are representative of this trend. Dobrowolski's continuing interest in new instrumental techniques (Music for Tuba Solo, 1973) and electronic media (culminating in his only exclusively digital composition, Passacaglia for TX, 1988) was matched by his preference for non-descriptive titles, such as the six pieces titled Music for Orchestra (1970–82). Of these, the last three admit more traditional elements, such as the use of a focal pitch class in no. 4, ‘A-la’ (1974), in which, in almost Lutosławskian fashion, ‘A constitutes the centre of symmetric vertical structures’.