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Born Debica Poland
1933, Krzysztof Penderecki came of age at exactly the right time to
become a vital part of what is now known as 'The Polish School' of
Modern music.
After Germany's
occupation of Poland in WWII destroyed the major concert halls and
conservatories, burnt most of the existing scores, and imprisoned or
murdered numerous musicians, classical music in Poland was reborn
under the severely limited conditions of Stalin's communism. However,
with Stalin's death in 1953, followed by the overthrow of Stalinist
regime in Poland in 1956, a Polish musical renaissance began turning
the music scene from a neo-classical backwater into an avant-garde
frontier.
This was a very
exciting time to be composing in Poland, as the work of Bartok,
Stravinsky, Boulez, and Stockhousen entered into the country
inspiring composers to push open the envelope of conventional musical
notation. Soon Penderecki's work was holding disregard for
traditional instrumentation and calling into question the border
between music and noise through what Penderecki called the
exploration of “noise as sound as music”. By taking
raw sound,
experimental orchestration techniques, and replacing sound pitch with
murmur, Penderecki was soon free from traditional elements such as
harmony and melody. Composing instead through colour, density and
dynamics Penderecki now “used/Abused conventional instruments
to
create extraordinary sonic collages”. Nicholas
Reyland
After beginning his
musical education at the Krakow State Academy of Music in 1954, by
1973 he had being given the position of professor at Yale University
and was rector of Krakow Musikhochschule.
The Saragossa
Manuscript Soundtrack
Penderecki's The
Saragossa Manuscript soundtrack is a remarkable mix of a
quasi-quotation of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" from his Ninth
Symphony, recurring Spanish baroque like acoustic guitar, and
Electroacoustic music composed at the Polish Radio Experimental
Studio. While the more traditional elements of the soundtrack remind
us that we are in fact watching a film based on a late Enlightenment
/ pre-Romantic novel, it is the cutting edge experiments in
electronic music that undoubtedly catch the ear most, reminding us
that we are watching anything but a conventional film.
Along with hundreds of
other films, TV and Radio scores of the period, the avant-garde
electrical sections of the soundtrack were composed at the Polish
Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw. The studio was opened in 1957 by
Jozef Patkowski and by 1960s, Penderecki (along with Kotonski) had
risen to become its most prominent figures. It was a truly
remarkable place that opened up the era of electroacoustic music in
Poland, welcoming both Polish and foreign composers in to experiment
with recording instruments and vocals onto magnetic tape, cutting
them up and adding effects, over 20 years before samplers and digital
editing.
The Saragossa
Manuscript catches Penderecki at a crossroads in his musical career.
While the decade before represents his most modernistic period, by
the mid 70s he was increasingly moving against the modernism he
previously represented claiming composers had “forgotten
about
music”. Therefore while Has' film represents traditionalism
transformed into modernism, Penderecki was actually moving in the
opposite direction, yet at the time of production both meet at
exactly the same point.
Remarkably, somehow
when placed against the film, Penderecki's soundtrack unarguably
makes perfect sense. Penderecki also scored Wojciech Has' The Codes
(1966) and Kubrick's 2001 and The Shining.
For a profile of
Penderecki's classical achievements see here
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"Polish
genius" - Le Monde
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