The music of Krzysztof Penderecki is renowned for the diversity of its stylistic directions and the wide range of aesthetic perspectives. The many attempts to describe the composer’s output and define the successive sources of his inspirations differ quite considerably. This may be proof of the somewhat elusive nature of Penderecki’s oeuvre, which evades the generalizations of traditional discourse about musical language. One of the most prominent Polish musicologists, Mieczyslaw Tomaszewski, describes the phenomenon of Penderecki’s music in the category of the ‘aesthetics of fullness’. According to Tomaszewski, it comprises the fullness of technical devices, the full range of styles and timbral and compositional devices meticulously ‘gathered’ from the abundantly rich treasure-trove of musical history. It also comprises the fullness of the explored sound material, which includes not only the complete historical experience in this area but also his never-ending sonoristic explorations. It might seem that such a ‘holistic’ aesthetic would result in an eclectic conglomerate of often disparate elements or an incomprehensible sum of individual musical ‘idioms’. However, all of Penderecki’s pieces are fully integrated compositions which refer to tradition in an extremely mature way, at the same time re-evaluating it in an original manner. During the “Warsaw Autumn” Festival in September 1987, Penderecki spoke of the need to “absorb everything that had existed before”. This was not a simple recipe for the craftsmanship of a modern composer bur rather an insistence on making a thorough knowledge of the past the starting point for creative work and on being open to future experiments. |