Kryzstof Penderecki: Sound Mass and Back to Bach

Kryzstof Penderecki: Sound Mass and Back to Bach 
By Bridget Castillo

    While the American avant-garde movements were turning either more towards abstract relations of signified and signifiers, or towards the lack thereof via minimalism, the Polish avant-garde of the 1960’s involved the adaptation of Sonorism and expressivity through use of extreme dissonance to achieve their aesthetic goals.  In this paper, I will discuss how it is that Krysztof Penderecki (b.1933) came to his expressive language through the adoption of Sonorism, and inquire as to why it may have been that his style changed at the end of the 1960’s; doing what others accuse him of as turning his back on the avant-garde and looking backwards to embrace tradition. 

    The politics of post-war Poland, as much as they may have affected Penderecki, did not mean anything within his compositions, which he asserts are purely abstract. He asserts: "I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete."  With the end of Stalin's era (with his death in 1953) there came a significant shift in the political and cultural spheres of Poland. The end of a reign of socialist realism’s strictures on music allowed composers the freedom to compose for the human spirit as opposed to the fulfillment of any political agendas.  This allowed Penderecki and others to have their works focused on the exploration of the incomprehensible universal rather than the issues of mundane political agendas.  Unlike Shostokovich, Penderecki and his contemporaries also did not have to veil what their pieces meant through complicated, overtly abstract expressivity.   Since the confines of socialist realism were no more, composers, dancers, film makers, and all manner of other Polish artists were allowed more room for inventiveness.  There was no longer a need for works to have double meanings and hermeneutics.  Rather, an artist or composer  could devote the meaning of their works to virtually any goal or message.

     Alongside contemporaries, Gorecki and Sorecki, Krysztof Penderecki was a part of what was then called the "Polish school" of composition.  In the 1960's, this group became known for its emphasis on the reduction of music into pure color and sound, focusing on a synthesis of a  dissonant, raw, harsh aural  composition.   Penderecki achieved this aesthetic was through the utilization of sound clusters and sound mass.   By using a close grouping of notes (clusters) simultaneously, he produces percussive sounds and expresses a rise in sound that heightens the sense of raw harshness.
    Further compositional experiments of the 1960’s so-called “Polish School” involved those of form, expressivity, and, most particularly, the setting aside serialist pan-tonality for Sonorism, which is “a special system of musical expression, in which the color of sound acquires an all encompassing meaning:  it becomes the sum-total of timbre, coloristic, textural and rhythmic-harmonic sides of musical language.”   Influenced by the expressive works of Karl Szymanowski and nationalistic works of the 1920’s, their works came to be characterized as "sonoristic" or as "sound mass" compositions.    A sound mass is the utilization of many or all of the twelve notes in the classical scale at once.  It is basically, a huge tone cluster.  One might imagine taking an open hand and banging random keys with your palm.  The resultant sound is not harmonious or tonal in the classical sense.  It is rough; raw, and beautiful in a very terrible way. 
It breaks the conventions and strict rules of tonality that Western European art music was headed towards, particularly through the canon that included Vivaldi, Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven.

    Though the use of sound clusters was composed and not random as would be the pounding of a palm upon the keys of a piano, the aural effect of hearing such a blend of colors is a vertically aural experience as opposed to the linear trajectory of classical harmonic progression.

    After the first world war, there came a reactive backlash to the sentimentality of the pre-war Romantic era and this classical tradition of harmonic rules and convention. Stravinksy's neoclassicism, techniques, and musico-theatrical preferences (such as the text setting of Oedepis Rex in Latin) would distance and almost alienate the audience; allowing them only to enjoy music as an object to be perceived, often with programmatic narrative of some sort.  Yet, in the second decade after the World War II, Penderecki wanted not to alienate his audiences, but to include them in the full emotional experience that his music could convey.  With this aim in mind, it can be said that his music often takes on the common sadness of the human condition.  Thus, although his music is often not in an immediately accessible language and is not “tonal”, it is still (through it’s abstract, emotional signification) emotionally accessible. Thus, this idiom became a much-used method of expression for the pieces in which they commonly referred to and invoked humanistic themes that often question the meaning of existence and morality.
    His 1967 work, Dies Irae was commissioned and dedicated to those murdered in Auschwitz.  In this work, we can see how Penderecki dramatizates a vocal work with text setting through the use of abstract idioms that would later be utilized in his work, the St. Luke's Passion.  In Dies Irae, especially in the introductory material, Penderecki utilizes tritone, perfect 5th, as well as chromatic relationships to unify the lines.  He also uses a highly texture-conscious orchestration to convey the dramatic material.  In the first movement, "Lamentatio" (which means to weep, wail),  Penderecki also makes use of many “modern” extended techniques.  The singers often whisper; the flutes flutter-tongue shrill notes; and the score itself is notated without meter.  The break-down of traditional conventions of Form has arrived.  Disorder and a complete break-down of structure seems to be inevitable.

    One particularly chilling moment is where the soprano whispers the word "strangulatorum" near the end of the movement to the respondent, humming moans of the choir.  Then, all of a sudden: utter chaos descends: The second movement is the Apocalypse.  The low brass play clusters in a sort of aboriginal-sounding drone at the introduction. The soprano's lonely voice floats, lost, over the colors of the accompanying choir. Soon, the entire choir whispers out of sync, relating how the coming apocalypse of revelations is soon.

    There is so much dissonance in this that there is no discernable was to rely purely on any harmonic language: rather, Penderecki's reliance on the colors and textures that are created through the interaction of the singers, strings, winds, and percussion. His orchestration tells the story rather than any harmonic consonance-dissonance relationships.

    In this way, Penderecki creates the a scene; Showing us through the decay of Form and earthly convention what it might be to descend into chaos, or the proverbial hell.  This is not "word painting" in any classically defined sense: Rather, it is the very lack of any clarity in any of the lines.  At times, each line/voice/instrument improvises wildly so as to convey this lack of structure and sense. The chaotic buzzing of the whispering, out of sync voices in this movement are in direct vertical and then horizontal juxtaposition to the plucked strings and drums.  This is a truly horrifying work.
    The third movement, Apotheosis, is one of transcending the madness of the apocalypse. It invokes an exaltation of the human condition and asks for a sort of elevation and glorification. However, one might think that Penderecki's use of these techniques stylistically engulfs the piece. How can the constant presence of dissonance not become static, despite the use of color and textural expression? Perhaps a comparison with an American avant-garde movement of the 60's called minimalism can be of use: Three characteristics of minimalism that can also be applied to an interpretation of Penderecki's Dies Irae are 1) There would not be any signification in the piece. 2)  It has a simple form. 3) It utilizes a process of repetition that makes a statement of certain structures in art.
    Although the piece is most certainly not minimalist, there are indeed
elements that minimalism explains well. There are no hermeneutics: hidden, secret meaning: However, this piece is plainly representational.  Perhaps in this way, we can stretch the meaning of "simple" to be inclusive of harmonic language, as well as structural characteristics. This third characteristic of in minimalism is of great importance when experiencing a performance of the piece. The constant use of the horrific sound mass: the continual scratching and tearing of the human soul becomes somewhat like a brand of tonality.  What was terrifying and heart wrenching at the beginning of the piece (in the Lamentatio, where the text reads "Bodies of Children From crematories Will fly High above history") might not be quite so horrific after twenty minutes of clusters and sound masses.

    Furthermore, what is to protect us from desensitization?  A process of repetition makes certain gruesome pictures in art ineffectual.  Artist Warhol said, "When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect."  In Warhol’s own work, Atomic Bomb, we see so many images of a mushroom cloud that our emotional reaction to what that mushroom cloud really signifies is convoluted, if not melted down and utterly dissolved.  This is comparable to Penderecki’s third movement, in that we should be somewhat pacified by the end; by the "victory" that the third movement (perhaps, ironically) evokes.  "Death is swallowed up in victory" are the final words of the piece, so, perhaps not irony, but maybe it is the futility of a victory that the music unconsciously conveys through its stagnant, unmoving, un-changing, un-liberated dissonance. An interpretation can even stretch it so that the pacification that happens at the end of the Apotheosis is only relative: Perhaps it is a deception of textures, not transcendence.
    Alternatively, it may be as UCLA Musicologist, Professor Robert Fink suggests in that the birth the “Apocalypse genre” is just a further symptom, or effect, of the decay of Western classical music.  From eighteenth century tonality at its finest; to the occasional German sixth chord; to the expressionist and modernist movements; then to neoclassical and post-modern; and now to clusters and sound masses: We can surmise that the end is near. 

    Yet, this may not be the case after all.  Perhaps Penderecki saw this, for he turned back to Bach in his own way soon after the completion of this work. Penderecki composed another work, his St. Luke's Passion, which is molded in part after JS Bach's St. Mathew's Passion. In this work, Penderecki utilizes the tone row motif B-A-C-H at transitional points; perhaps to show that it is tradition that holds us together.  With the composition of St. Luke's Passion, Penderecki went from the forefront of the Polish avant-garde, as one of the revolutionary composers to turn away from the German canon, right to "back to Bach". Accompanied in this sort of a-progression by Gorecki, Penderecki was searching for a means of expression that would be immediately accessible to his audiences. With this motivation, he also turned to Lassus and other Renaissance composers for influences in his works to come. Although Penderecki's works changed after the 1960’s, he claims that his later works are  “still avant-garde, but the age of experimentation is over. We discovered everything!"  With this sort of resignation, he too turns to tradition for answers and meaning. Meanwhile, the afore-mentioned American minimalists diverge from the wild avant-garde and utilize remnants of the past: La Monte Young took the Polish clusters and systemetizes them: making them susceptible to the desensitization that Warhol mentions.  Furthermore, Berio's Sinfonia forces the listener to reach back within themselves and recall the events and great works of the past in a sort of montage tribute.  Even some of the most commonly known classically-influenced works today that are in film music carry in them references to musical styles and compositions of the past, a most particular exemplar being the work of John Williams.  With his ties to Mahler and Wagner, his works recall the beauty and dramatic inevitability that modern film utilizes to create subconscious emotional states in the views of film.

    Penderecki and his contemporaries turned back to and simultaneously re-invented tradition.   After the rejection the classical music canon to embrace Sonorism, Sound Mass techniques, and the decay of form in works such as  Dies Irae, his return to the conventions of Western classical musicals Forms and   techniques marked a shift in his view of the use and capabilities utilized by the early Polish School's avant garde.  After the realization that moving forward would lead to complete destruction of the genre and music, he embraced tonality and utilized it to create works not centered around destruction and decay; but about the human spirit and true progressional invention. By looking back to the past, he was able to move forward.