Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Krzysztof Penderecki
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
I'm really just a frustrated violinist.
Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.
So many new things have been discovered in the 20th century that now, at the end of the century, we need some kind of synthesis, some musical language which will allow us just to write music.
My grandfather taught me trees and the Latin names of trees when I was five or six. His father was a forester, so he knew them all.
There is some limit to finding, always, new things. It's rather impossible.
My music is rather abstract and maybe even strange-sounding for some people, so maybe that's why it's been used in so many horror movies and thrillers.
With Orff it is text, text, text - the music always subordinate. Not so with me. In 'Magnificat,' the text is important, but in some places I'm writing just music and not caring about text. Sometimes I'm using extremely complicated polyphony where the text is completely buried. So no, I am not another Orff, and I'm not primitive.
There's a kind of passionate expression in all my pieces. It's just that the nature of the expression takes different forms.
Every day I write. I am not waiting for a great idea from heaven.
The 1960s were a time of cultural revolution in Poland. And I was a part of that revolution. For me, those years - the late 1950s and early 1960s - were the most fruitful.
I always felt independent of musical fashion.
The isolation of Eastern Europe actually helped me to be so original. I couldn't travel so much, I had to find my own things, such as making the strings sound like electronic music.
Poland is different from the other so-called socialist countries. We have a different background. Poland belongs to the West, not the East. We belong to the Mediterranean, Latin culture, not to the Byzantine, which is very different and which you find in Bulgaria and even parts of Czechoslovakia and, of course, Romania.
I started with very tonal 19th-century music because I wanted to be a violinist as a child. So this was my first music, and then I was very much influenced by Stravinsky and Shostakovich in the 1950s. But I was starting to develop my own style.
I don't like to be alone. I like to have my family around me. They disturb me, of course, but that's OK.
Conducting is a natural way to participate in one's own music. Almost every 19th-century composer Mendelssohn, Mahler was conducting or playing his own music. Mozart did both.
That is our dilemma in Poland. We don't like to be ruled by the East.
Big forms fascinate me.
Composers are very individual creatures.
My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin. My mother was very religious and went to church twice a day. My grandmother was Armenian. So I was raised with three different faiths - that's why I am so open.
Listen to the triple fugue in 'Magnificat' - the first subject is seven voices, the second one has 52 different voices, the third uses five; then I combine all together. Such textures you cannot call primitive.
I have written many works to accompany Old Church Slavonic texts.
I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.
It's no longer possible to find something which will shock other people, because everything has already been done.
When Kubrick called me about 'The Shining,' it was very strange. He first asked me to write music for his film, but I instead gave him suggestions about some of my pieces. I told him about 'The Awakening of Jacob,' which he did use in 'The Shining.'
When writing music for the 'Kaddish,' I evoked the prayers that were sung in Eastern Galicia, Ukraine and Romania. I was advised by my late friend, Boris Carmeli... He would sing me various melodies that were sung by his grandfather, thus they had to be at least as old as the mid-19th century.
I started music late.
I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.
As a young man I couldn't travel, nobody could travel, they wouldn't give us a passport. For many years I was trying to go abroad. And then one day I read in the newspaper about a new competition for composers, and the first prize was a trip to the West. I decided I must get the first prize, so I wrote three pieces in three different styles.
You can only learn orchestration if you have the possibility of using an orchestra.
Traveling, talking to people, and rehearsing, I'm always finding new ideas. If I stay in one place, maybe I won't have so many ideas.
Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.
I started to write religious music at a time when it was absolutely impossible. The first religious work I wrote was the 'Psalms of David,' when I was still a student in 1957... At that time, religious music was really forbidden.
All I'm interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.
Works of art inspire me to compose.
I accept all of the music that I wrote.
I studied violin since I was a boy, and my dream was to be a violinist and to play.
I began as a violinist, not a composer. Thus my contact with orchestral musicians, with the source of music, is very important.
Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would rather live.
There is something about performing my own music, and other people's music, that gives me pleasure. I think I learn more by doing that than I ever did studying music.
Latin is an international language.
I was a very religious child.
I'm never satisfied. I don't think about what has come before because I'm trying to find something different than I did before.
In summer, I like to sit and compose on the porch, where I can see people come and go.
I wrote 'Threnody,' then I wrote several works where I changed my music completely.
If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.
For me, music is pure abstraction.
There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.
I think in work like 'Passion According to St Luke,' which I wrote when the Church was being persecuted by the Communist regime, it mattered to me to declare for the cause. I sided with the militant Church and I think my music fulfilled an important socio-political function.
I don't really think my work breaks into periods. In fact, if you listen to my work in all its so-called periods, what you should hear is continuity.
Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.
If I were reborn, if I were a teen-ager now, starting my career as a composer, I would do again what I have done.
In my own works I am an obsessionist. Though I write humorous music too, much of it has been obsessed by death and the tragic.
One should live with history round one.
Melody was banned from music by the composers of the avant-garde. I was unique among them in always using and writing melody and so I think this is why I've shared my music, why they can have also pleasure, not only an interesting structure.
Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.
I must never change my way - because of critics who may not like it - I preserve my language and my style.
I was growing up in a communist time, especially, and the other music, the western music, was banned, so on radio half of the music was Chopin. So my colleagues and I were a little bit allergic to this music because it was everywhere - everywhere!
After so many years, I don't really think writing has to be absolutely new. No. It has to be good work.
After music, trees are my passion. My great-grandfather was a forester, so maybe it is genetic. My father would take me for walks in the forest and sometimes I would play truant with him. 'You won't learn anything in a communist school, my boy,' he would say. He loved trees too.
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