Krzysztof Penderecki

I was a very religious child.

I have always had an audience for my music, even in the very avant garde, crazy times.

When the Second World War started, I was only five but I still remember... Being a witness... I wanted people to remember what happened in our country and elsewhere.

I have lived through very difficult times.

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.

I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.

I always had my roots in the past.

I have found my perfect place on earth in Poland, in Luslawice, near Krakow.

My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin. My mother was very religious and went to church twice a day. My grandmother was Armenian. So I was raised with three different faiths - that's why I am so open.

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

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

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

Composers are very individual creatures.

I accept all of the music that I wrote.

I'm never satisfied. I don't think about what has come before because I'm trying to find something different than I did before.

Latin is an international language.

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

The isolation of Eastern Europe actually helped me to be so original. I couldn't travel so much, I had to find my own things, such as making the strings sound like electronic music.

I don't believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can't play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.

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.

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

I grew up at the time of Social Realism in Poland, when everyone was supposed to be 'writing for the workers.' But I soon became allergic to this. I have never written for audiences. I like it if they appreciate my music. But I would never change my style for them.

I take commissions because I know I'll have to get up early in the morning and work.

Usually composers need a reason to write. I need a deadline.

Everyone is born lazy.

Poles have a mistrust of the West and an even deeper mistrust of the East.

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

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.

I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.

At school, I wrote in the style of the Dutch composers. After I graduated, a new style set in.

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

I don't really think my work breaks into periods. In fact, if you listen to my work in all its so-called periods, what you should hear is continuity.

I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.

I wrote 'Threnody,' then I wrote several works where I changed my music completely.

As a young man I couldn't travel, nobody could travel, they wouldn't give us a passport. For many years I was trying to go abroad. And then one day I read in the newspaper about a new competition for composers, and the first prize was a trip to the West. I decided I must get the first prize, so I wrote three pieces in three different styles.

One should live with history round one.

I'm really just a frustrated violinist.

I started music late.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

For me, music is pure abstraction.

All I'm interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.