Best quotes by Krzysztof Penderecki on Music

Checkout quotes by Krzysztof Penderecki on Music

• ‟ Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ For me, music is pure abstraction.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.

  - 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ I started music late.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ I began as a violinist, not a composer. Thus my contact with orchestral musicians, with the source of music, is very important.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.'

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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!

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki
  

• ‟ I accept all of the music that I wrote.

  - Krzysztof Penderecki