Top 40 Krzysztof Penderecki Quotes

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.

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.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

I don’t like to be alone. I like to have my family around me. They disturb me, of course, but that’s OK.

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.

I always felt independent of musical fashion.

I have written many works to accompany Old Church Slavonic texts.

I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.

I must never change my way – because of critics who may not like it – I preserve my language and my style.

I think the best publicity I can get for my music is to conduct it.

I was a very religious child.

I always had my roots in the past.

I studied violin since I was a boy, and my dream was to be a violinist and to play.

Writing music is something very natural… this is the way to communicate with other people.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

Latin is an international language.

The communists saw what we did in the arts as the only product of socialism that was known in the West, so they tolerated it.

You can only learn orchestration if you have the possibility of using an orchestra.

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

For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.

Big forms fascinate me.

Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.

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 write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.

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

Every day I write. I am not waiting for a great idea from heaven.

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.

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.

I accept all of the music that I wrote.

I used to do most of my composing at a little table in a cafe. Composing for 52 instruments, I had to figure out how to accommodate myself to the small table.

There’s a kind of passionate expression in all my pieces. It’s just that the nature of the expression takes different forms.

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’m not a minimalist, not at all. I feel much better, safer even, having a large piece.

The circumstances In which I grew up In Poland were not auspicious for humor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After so many years, I don’t really think writing has to be absolutely new. No. It has to be good work.

I have lived through very difficult times.