Composers: What’s the Score?

In Cracow, so many people showed up that an additional performance had to be scheduled to accommodate the 10,000 ticket seekers. In Warsaw, one of the biggest crowds ever to pack National Philharmonic Hall cheered and clapped for ten minutes. In Venice’s San Giorgio church, where applause is forbidden, clergy and audience alike burst into a spontaneous ovation that one priest excused as “homage our Lord would surely want us to pay.” The acclaim was neither for a renowned solo ist nor an old master, but for the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ According to St. Luke by Polish Composer Krzysztof Penderecki, Europe’s most impressive new voice in modern music.

Austerely contemporary in sound, Penderecki’s two-hour oratorio draws on a wide musical spectrum ranging from pious Gregorian chants to the dry linearity of the twelve-tone school. In a fresh departure from the Passions of Bach and Telemann, his chorus participates as well as comments, punctuating Christ’s ascent to Calvary with hisses, shouts and mocking laughter, while the music quavers and sighs in sympathetic counterpoint. With the lean, clean strokes of a fencer, Penderecki slices to the heart of the Passion, revealing through the intolerance shown to one man the tragedy of all men.

Saws & Sirens. Passion is Penderecki’s latest and most ambitious work. Now 33, he leapt into prominence seven years ago when he anonymously entered three compositions in a competition sponsored by the Polish Composer’s Association —and walked off with first, second and third prizes. The first performances of his music in Poland were attended by hard-core traditionalists who touched off riots with whistles and rattles. Penderecki merely answered with some noisemakers of his own, scored one piece for woodwinds, musical saws, files, sirens, typewriters and electric bells, not to ignore the percussionist whose work entailed assaulting a log with a handsaw.

The problem of scoring for such non-instruments is something that even the great orchestrater Rimsky-Korsakoff could not have foreseen. Even Penderecki’s requirements for customary instruments compelled him to devise a new written language that would convey the sounds he wanted to hear. Today, many of his notational inventions have become the accepted form for avant-garde composers. Tone clusters, for example are designated by highest and lowest notes by A ar>d V !

^r^i^i means to saw, »»»>»»» to rub, ^ to use a mallet, and f f f to tap the chair with the bow. Sometimes he even uses plain old-fashioned musical notes.

Mass for 400. In the Passion according to Penderecki, nearly everything comes up , but many of his colleagues nevertheless accuse him of falling back too heavily on traditional music forms, insist that there is nothing wrong with the piece that a little more »»»»»»> and f f f wouldn’t fix. But Penderecki could not care less. Unlike many modernists, he does not feel obligated to any school or movement. Instead, he fashions the music to suit the subject, forges a style that is uniquely his own by freely incorporating any and all musical modes into a modern context. His disdain even reaches to clothing; instead of the studied, unkempt appearance favored by the avantgarde, he wears trimly tailored suits and adorns his 19-year-old actress wife in the latest Paris fashions.

Now on a leave of absence from the Cracow School of Music, Penderecki is teaching composition at the Folkwang-Hochschule für Music in Essen in West Germany and hammering away on a raft of new commissions, including two works that will receive their premières in the U.S. He is also composing a Good Friday Mass for 400 voices and an opera based on a 17th century witch trial that, he says, “will be a grand spectacle with hundreds of choristers, many soloists and as many musicians as I can squeeze into the pit.” Not bad for a Polish fellow who started out with ten typewriters and a .