Krzysztof Penderecki

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

Timjim 2008