Big forms fascinate me.
Krzysztof Penderecki
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.
For me, music is pure abstraction.
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.
I always had my roots in the past.
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.
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.
I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.
Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would rather live.
After so many years, I don't really think writing has to be absolutely new. No. It has to be good work.
Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.
All I'm interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.
I don't like to be alone. I like to have my family around me. They disturb me, of course, but that's OK.
I wrote 'Threnody,' then I wrote several works where I changed my music completely.
For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.
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.
When the Second World War started, I was only five but I still remember... Being a witness... I wanted people to remember what happened in our country and elsewhere.
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'm never satisfied. I don't think about what has come before because I'm trying to find something different than I did before.
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.
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!
The circumstances In which I grew up In Poland were not auspicious for humor.
I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.
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.
I think the best publicity I can get for my music is to conduct it.
I studied violin since I was a boy, and my dream was to be a violinist and to play.
I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.
I have always had an audience for my music, even in the very avant garde, crazy times.
I have lived through very difficult times.
Latin is an international language.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can only learn orchestration if you have the possibility of using an orchestra.
There is some limit to finding, always, new things. It's rather impossible.
I don't believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can't play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.
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.
One should live with history round one.
I have written many works to accompany Old Church Slavonic texts.
Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.
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.
It's no longer possible to find something which will shock other people, because everything has already been done.
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.
