Welcome! I'm Max Horowitz, producer and host of Penderecki in Memoriam Podcast. This podcast is created by Anna Perzanowska and presented by Polish Cultural Institute New York. Penderecki in Memoriam Podcast unveils a multi-faceted portrait of Krzysztof Penderecki, with commentary from musicians, colleagues, radio programmers, and writers who lend insight and memories of Poland's greatest modern composer. This podcast is part of Penderecki in Memoriam Worldwide Project, honoring the life and legacy of the great composer. Thank you to project partners Dux, Naxos, Ludwig van Beethoven Association, and Schott EAM for sharing Krzysztof Penderecki’s music with the world.
Academy and Golden Globe Award-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal creates works for film, orchestra, theater, opera, and ballet. In addition to his more than 30 film scores, Goldenthal, who is an ASCAP Founders Award winner, has received multiple Tony, Obie, and Drama Desk nominations for his more than a dozen theatrical productions. The composer's Symphony in G# Minor had its world premiere with the Pacific Symphony, and his two-act opera Grendel, directed by Julie Taymor, was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in music, premiering at the Los Angeles Opera and was a centerpiece for New York's Lincoln Center Festival.
As a major figure of the 20th century's Polish avant-garde, Krzysztof Penderecki’s use of aleatoric notation and controlled improvisation was a huge influence on Elliot Goldenthal as a student, young composer, and throughout his career. The two finally met in 2015 when Goldenthal's trumpet concerto was presented at the Krakow Film Music Festival. Elliot Goldenthal is here with us to talk about the great maestro. Hi, Elliott; thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Thank you so much!
Let's start back in Brooklyn. As the story goes, when you were a student in the ’70s, studying scores, you're in the Brooklyn public library at Grand Army Plaza, and you pulled a score off the shelf one day which had a picture of Penderecki, who you recalled looked like a magician.
The magician… I don't know where that quote comes from, but it was a kind of very intense character: jet black and his glasses. I was at the library at my last year of high school; it must have been 1969 or something, 1970. And I looked at this score; and it could have been the Threnody, it could have been his first string quartet. I looked at a picture of the maestro, and I just couldn't believe it. His scores and his beard kind of melded together, which is like giant swashes of jet black. Then I went to the listening library some days later with the score, and I couldn't believe it! I just could not believe the sound. Of course, I wasn't living in a vacuum; I came from a place where I was well acquainted with, you know, a Milton Babbitt avant-garde New York school composers, not to mention the primal scream of John Coltrane in his most avant-garde period. So I wasn't new to expressionist music in this fashion, but the way that Penderecki was able to coax those sounds out of a string quartet, out of a chorus, out of a string orchestra, out of brass! When I looked at the Pittsburgh Overture score for mainly wind instruments, I just couldn't believe the sonorities. The emotional impact – someone hit your chest with a sledgehammer.
And I suppose at that point you never could have imagined that someday you'd be in Katowice premiering your trumpet concerto on a program with his music, and with him sitting right behind you, and congratulating you.
It was an all Penderecki program. I think it was celebrating his 80th birthday year; he was 79 at the time. You can imagine the fear I had, hearing my music through his ears and wondering what he must be thinking. I couldn't imagine being in that position as a student, but I was lucky after that to study with John Corigliano – that was my final year in high school when I entered the conservatory Manhattan School of Music; and he was also very much influenced, or recognized the brilliance of, Krzysztof Penderecki’s use of mutation and his mastery of form through that notation. It's not only sonorities, not only this colors of sounds, not only the brazen use of string textures and orchestral textures; it was also the deepness of the form. Being an admirer of Penderecki’s music, and then being a double admirer of John Corigliano, who taught me – he coaxed and took some of the sounds off this score, and took me through it as a master does his student. In my younger days and because of the influence of Julie Taymor's life on my life, I used to compose a lot of work for theater, a lot of work for avant-garde theater, a non-traditional theater and especially for puppet theater. And that's one thing Penderecki in Groteska Theater in Krakow, he composed, like, more than 40 pieces for a puppet theater. Little little, we would say, off of broadway or a kind of a cabaret type theater; of course they had to hide out in secret bars and places and taverns under the ground below the surface of Krakow. The same motivation is kind of freeing you up, where the music is not taken that seriously. Experimentation – adventurism was very important. Also in the early days of my study at the conservatory, Colombia-Princeton Electronic Music School was amazing, and had a big influence on American composers. And Penderecki with the early electronic experiments also, according to him, was very influential over the way he treated the orchestra. It had a more of a expansive palette, and a richness and a scarier element. His work ‘Canon for a String Orchestra and Two Tapes’ tied in both of those worlds.
You're surrounded by John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and those musical influences were with you prior to discovering Penderecki. Your musical life and your listening life. How were you first influenced by Penderecki’s compositional and orchestral techniques?
Analyze how he was able to coax that sound out of the orchestra. One thing that John Corigliano was very instructive about – he was able to get textures and sonorities that, if you wrote it out in traditional European notation, the rehearsal would take, like, 30 hours, you know? If you look at the complexity of some of Elliot Carter's scores, for example, that sounds great, but it takes devotion in the rehearsal period! When you have a three-hour rehearsal situation and you have one hour to devote to your piece. Penderecki’s approach is a way to create illusions of those sound textures without the enormous burden of rehearsals, as long as the composer knows exactly how to coax the orchestra.
So, you're saying that the notational practices were a way to deal with the dissonance, deal with the complex rhythms, deal with the tone clusters, the glissandi… All of these effects were really only achieved in a time effective way through the notation.
It helped. It's impossible to categorize Penderecki’s music and reduce it to the various things, but if you have nine violins playing across the strings between the bridge and the tail piece, for example… I don't want to be technical, but if you have 20 strings doing that, it produces a type of complexity. If you try to write it out in actual notes, it would take forever to transcribe and even perform. Also, there was a correspondence between the graphic art in the 1940s and ’50s. Franz Kline, Motherwell, Jackson Pollock all over paintings, the abstract expressionism – it was something that I was exposed to, but Penderecki’s music was the closest to that, and seeing that large large painting of Franz Kline with his giant black lines across the canvas, hearing this entire bass and cello section playing semitones and quarter tones in swaths of sound…
In 2018, you visited the maestro and his wife, Elżbieta, at their home, and you toured the garden which is nothing short of amazing. How do you remember this meeting?
I just got off the plane. I was going into rehearsal those days for the trumpet concerto, and with great trepidation, here I was, going to have to be on the same program of an all-Penderecki concert. Meeting him at his house, I thought I was being overwhelmed. I thought I was going to be overwhelmed by this amazing figure. When I met him, I saw a tremendous warmth in his eyes, a tremendous simple gracious interaction he had with me, and I assume with other younger composers or his contemporaries. We spent hours and hours – we talked about many subjects, including his times with Shostakovich, his reactions to Bruckner, for example; he was taken by Anton Bruckner’s symphonies. A host of subjects, and then walking around his gardens – you know, he was a botanist. He felt that his work planting trees is kind of a unfinished symphony, and he had this labyrinth on his property. He used to get lost, just wander alone; it's kind of very telling. He really really enjoyed that process of walking alone in this labyrinth that he created for himself: a labyrinth in nature at the same time trying to work out his grand structures.
I wanted to touch on three Penderecki pieces you’ve referenced; a couple of them all had great significance in your musical life. Penderecki received an award for the ‘Canon’. The piece was written in 1962. Usually in early performances there would be a lot of controversy, but this piece did not. It really enhanced his profile.
I don't believe it's a long piece; maybe eight-and-a-half minutes or something like that. The impact was tremendous. It challenges the ear. It's not exactly tonal music. The thing that influenced me is the mixture of tape and orchestra electronically, but not trying to sound like an orchestra just with coloration. And then the orchestra was almost trying to sound like the electronic component. The mixture of tape and orchestra playing simultaneously was something that I was first introduced to by that ‘Canon’ piece. And it has a riveting effect because you have the dead unhuman recorded sound, and then you have this complex community of human beings playing something live at the same time. It's interaction between something that's already dead and fixed; something that, it's alive and trembling. I was really taken by that experience of listening, and then applying it to a cinema application.
With the two tape machines, there was something like 208 parts, which really created this spatial, three-dimensional sound.
Who knows? You know, when you hear you can't discern that, unless you come from Mars or something. You can't hear, really hear that all the levels of deep structure that he applied to it, but when you study it, it becomes more apparent. But in the listening experience you're just taken into this spatial world of – you know, it's like opening up a door in a dream. The door looks familiar, but as soon as you open it, it's another world, another place you haven't been ever.
Let's move to ‘The Devils of Loudoun’, which of course is based on the Aldous Huxley book. Penderecki’s first and most popular opera written in 1968, and then it was revised a few times in the ’70s, and it's based on this French historical event but underscores local power and really has a political commentary denouncing the inequities of a totalitarian state – a subject matter that Penderecki often wanted to display.
Well the critical response to that was not friendly; it was not friendly. He had various forces that he had to contend with. The state, coming from a very very Roman Catholic country like Poland, the subject matter was very very difficult within the church. Inquisitional-type material that was 17th century, in and of itself being anti-totalitarian or also having that slant of the church, was very very volatile stuff. What influenced me was the type of choral soloistic writing. One can have the most demanding dissonances and atonal stretches of music, and then have pockets of tonality in the tradition of romantic composers’ tonality. ‘Passion of Saint Luke's’ – the same structures where he has these swashes of gestures, and then you have the baritone singing in aria, Deus Meus in G minor, and it sounds so fresh and sounds so powerful. He was able to reach out – develop in his life another Penderecki that, coming out of the great vocal tradition of Europe, the great tonal tradition of the romantic composers. Years and years listening to him, it's amazing! His work from the 1970s, from the ‘Polish Requiem’ on.
Okay, let's finish with the ‘Pittsburgh Overture’.
His use of sonorities that you usually don't expect of brass instruments, trombones, bass trombones, and tuba, for example – all that’s is indicated is the lowest possible note, play the lowest possible note. He indicated the tonguing, going from the repetitions to jagged repetitions to as fast as possible. This note and the slide down a half a quarter tone while playing out of sync not corresponding with the neighbor musician… So it released me, my way of thinking of a brass ensemble. From a metric kind of a vehicle to an ensemble that also takes in sonority references that wasn't on display of previous scores.
As a commission from the American Wind Symphony written in 1967, this illustrates Penderecki’s exploration into 12-tone composition.
Of course. You heard those sounds, I heard those sounds in Duke Ellington, in terms of lower brass. Very, very influential on me in terms of brass writing.
Right, so you have these extended techniques. A lot of percussion and instruments that are a little unusual for a wind ensemble, but a great result. Very evocative piece, very dramatic pacing.
Elliot, in closing, I just wanted to get your recollections of last March 29th, when the great maestro passed away.
I was hoping to attend his birthday; I was hoping just to continue a relationship that was kind of just ignited when we shared that concert. My memories of Krzysztof Penderecki, the professor, the great maestro, the memories just expanding. You appreciate someone's work when you're alive, when a person is alive; but then you delve into their incredible library, and you can see like a universe – you know, patterns, structures, and so many works that it's worthy of study and listening and just being emotionally involved with. Just a tip of the iceberg in terms of being so lucky as to having a person that you can speak to about stuff you can't speak to anyone else in this globe about – for example, the atmosphere, political atmosphere in 1957 in Poland and Russia, and you can't just share with anyone. And all of a sudden all of that possibility is done, it's over; the person is dead. You won't hear Penderecki’s next great work. I don't know. Whether you're in your thirties or in your eighties when you – one out of a million like Penderecki, one of the billion. A person's death is no words; there's no words.
Elliot Goldenthal, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to discuss Poland's greatest contemporary composer, Krzysztof Penderecki.
Thank you so much, and enjoy your day.