Gorecki (Adrian Thomas)
The following are excerpts from the book, Gorecki (Adrian Thomas).
Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki (Dec. 6, 1933 – Nov. 12, 2010) is one of the most influential 20th Century composers to have gained an almost ‘rock-star’ status among the general populace, in particular for his 3rd Symphony. He was undeniably Christian and although he was thoroughly immersed in 20th Century modernism, being influenced by serialist techniques, he managed to write music that was highly emotionally expressive. His language started as experimental and modern, but he could also easily write in familiar harmonic idioms. Throughout all of his compositions, he conveyed universally accepted musical expressions both of highly respected avant garde composers of his generation, such as Pierre Boulez, as well as to a contemporary continental audience.
The composer “has become known throughout the musical world in the past few years as the composer of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976). Its phenomenal success, however, should not be allowed to mask a forty-year career stemming from the post Stalinist era of the mid-1950s and embracing over seventy acknowledged compositions.”
He was born on the family farm on the outskirts of the nearby village of Czernica, Polanld. His father led dance bands at local weddings, and he began learning to play piano and violin at about age ten. His first attempts at writing music “were mostly little songs and miniatures, although by the start of the 1950s he had progressed to composing a larger-scale Sonata in the Style of Corelli for string quintet.”
“He applied to several Intermediate Schools of Music, including those in Rybnik, Bytom, and Katowice, but to his immense frustration he found that he was regarded as too untutored and too old (normal entry to intermediate schools was at the age of 15). But after all the emotional, physical, and musical disadvantages he had overcome, Gorecki was not going to be deterred. He enrolled for a year at a music learning center in Rybnik (open to all ages), where he studied the piano, and at the same time he took on a full-time job as a primary school teacher…Here he also gained experience conducting choirs, teaching the violin and the piano, and writing the music and verse for school drama productions mounted in local villages. In 1952, he succeeded in winning a place on the teacher-training course at the Intermediate School of Music in Rybnik, enabling him not only to have professional lessons on the piano, clarinet, and violin but also to catch up on subjects such as harmony and counterpoint, instrumentation, and folklore…when he started going to orchestral concerts in Katowice, two hours away by train, he would use the journey to study Beethoven symphonies or analyze some Bach. He often missed the last connecting train home and would then spend the night composing or sleeping on the table in the waiting-room at Rybnik before returning home at 5:30 a.m., just in time to leave again for his job at the primary school.”
“By studying intensively at Rybnik, Gorecki was able to complete his teacher-training course in only three years. Compositionally, he was still essentially self-taught, although his piano teacher would play through his pieces with him- still mainly songs and piano miniatures…When he applied to study composition at the Higher School of music in Katowice (by then renamed Stalinogrod) in 1955, Gorecki had a folder bulging with compositions which were sufficiently strong to impress his future teacher, Boleslaw Szabelski (1896-1979)…They shared a profound admiration for the music of Szymanowski, who had been Szabelsk’s teacher in Warsaw in the late 1920s.”
Lists of Gorecki’s principle works often begin with songs of Joy and Rhythm, which was premiered in Katowice in February of 1958. During this time, he continued to study music, even though life was hard. “He kept himself informed by buying periodicals Ruch muzyczny (Musical Movement) and Muzyke, and he put money aside to buy one score each week, even if that meant going without food.”
He became knowledgeable of Western techniques from composers such as Webern and Schoenberg. In 1959, His first Symphony was a major landmark in Gorecki’s own oeuvre and was a radical jolt to Polish music of the time. We teach these techniques to our students in our music school in Odessa, Texas.
Utilizing serialist techniques in Three Diagrams “Gorecki does not make direct connections between middle-ground substructures (manipulation of numerical series) and foreground pitches. This remote stratification is not untypical in serial techniques.”
Gorecki’s Monologhi, Op. 16 (1960) is his “most committed statement of the serialist ethos espoused by Boulez and others.”
His work, Scontri represents “the most colourful and vibrant expression of the new Polish wave which he had headed since the premiere of the Concerto in 1958. The premiere caused an uproar, critical brickbats and bouquets, not least because of the irregular disposition of the large orchestra on stage…Scontri remains a crucial work and is worth examining in some detail…Arguably the most significant development is the rationalization of Gorecki’s serial techniques. He continues to apply these to pitch, dynamics, and durations, but seems for the most part to have abandoned the derivation of subseries through partitioning. Instead, he composes four separate series, a main one and three others assigned to different instrumental families…Gorecki was less interested in avant-garde effects than in musical discourse by conventional means.”
In his Diagram IV, he “develops new notational devices governing duration, types of repetition, order of events, and rhythmic and performance indications…devised a unique pitch structure to define and hold in check the new freedom he was giving to performers to shape some of the interior details.”
The composer discusses his work, Elementi, “‘the foundation of the construction of the entire piece is the set of intervals of the Prime and Retrograde series’, but not that ‘as for the sound phenomena, their sequence, duration, dynamics, these I regulate purely by ear…As soon as I draw formal consequences from a series, I no longer stick to the initial sequence of the sounds in the series. I choose what I consider most appropriate at a given moment.’” These are concepts we teach our students in our music school in Odessa, Texas, encouraging them to be intuitive, not just analytical in their musical judgments.
“Gorecki’s Genesis project was an intense and often disturbing examination of both himself and his materials. It raised questions of the nature of continuity and contrast, of the relationship between pitch and other types of sound, and of the need or otherwise for an audibly comprehensible structure…Refrain appears to be a pivotal work, drawing from its predecessors and anticipating later compositions, sometimes at a remove of many years…in Refrain the individual and uncompromised balance between technique and expression for which he had been so diligently searching” was achieved.
At the end of the 1960s, he wrote Muzyczke 4. “Until the blossoming of his international reputation in the late 1980s, this unusually scored chamber piece was Gorecki’s most frequently performed work both at home and abroad.”
“The 1960s were years of maturation for many Polish composers, as their individual styles and outlooks crystallized. Lutoslawski and Penderecki were seen abroad as the symbols of the Polish avant-garde, of the so-called ‘Polish school’…Polish composers had played briefly in the late 1950s and early 1960s with new idioms and technical ploys from the West before discarding or dismantling them as they sought their own path. By and large they concentrated on expressive contact with their listeners rather than investing in complex technical means. Their vigorous compositions met enthusiasm, puzzlement, and occasional hostility: their music was regarded in some quarters as shallow, mere sound for sound’s sake…but there really was no denying that by 1970 there was a wealth and variety of music coming from Poland, with a dozen or more composers beginning to make headway abroad. Gorecki’s situation was not untypical.” We encourage our students in our school in Odessa, Texas to be unique in their own musical development.
“Gorecki is very much his own man in his dealings with the outside world, and his compositional career has shown the same single-minded purpose. Although he is not given to theoretical or philosophical musings, he is passionately concerned with musical materials and how his ear moulds them. So the shift of his attention in the 1970s away from the previous decade’s objective explorations of instrumental textures, horizontal and vertical symmetries, and detailed parametric concerns was made in his own time and for his own reasons: to harness his discoveries to overtly expressive and sometimes highly personal compositions. An integral part of this new focus was Gorecki’s wish to return to the human voice.”
Gorecki discussed his appreciation for Bach, “If for instance I am stuck at some point, and the composition does not come, a week passes, a month, and I cannot find any solution, then Bach comes to my rescue. There was such a place in Ad matrem…I had a rough outline, but I was not able to make that lyrical moment on the strings…I had the vocal ending, but that lyrical fragment still evaded me. So I abandoned my work for some time and later, by chance, I opened Bach’s Prelude in E flat minor [Book I, No. 8]. I played it and instantly, as by the touch of a magic wand, I moved forward.” The music of J.S. Bach is foundational for the students of our music school in Odessa, Texas.
“Gorecki was an exacting teacher, and several of Poland’s most talented young composers had the benefit of his critical gaze. These included three of the precocious generation born in 1951: Rafal Augustyn, Eugeniusz Knapik, and Andrzea Kranowski (d. 1990).”
“The description of some of Gorecki’s works as sacred must be taken in the broadest artistic and spiritual sense…The relationship of his religious beliefs to his artistic credo was summed up by the composer himself in the acceptance speech he gave on being awarded an honorary doctorate at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, on 28 February 1995… ‘Each authentic work of art interprets the reality beyond sensory perception. It is born of silence, admiration, or the protest of an honest heart. It tries to bring closer the mystery of reality. So what constitutes the essence of art is found deep within each person. It is there where the aspiration to give meaning to one’s life is accompanied by the fleeting sense of beauty and the mysterious unison of things. Authentic and humble artists are perfectly well aware, no matter what kind of beauty characterizes their handiwork, that their paintings, sculptures or creations are nothing else but the reflection of God’s Beauty. No matter how strong the charm of their music and words, they know that their works are only a distant echo of God’s Word.” It is this kind of reverence and worship that we hope each student in our music school in Odessa, Texas embraces.
“Gorecki concluded his speech with the quiet observation: ‘Those words are perfect: you can neither add to them not take anything away. Just think deeply about the sense of those words.’ It is in this reverential context that Gorecki sees all his creative output, from the largest orchestral works to the most modest church song.”
Having transitioned from highly structured serialistic techniques to more tonal-centered works, in his work Lerchenmusic, “Use of triads becomes increasingly structural…In essence Gorecki views triadic formations as substantive, stable, and reliable even though he almost always uses them in supposedly unstable inversions and not root positions. Because he normally concludes his compositions with a sense of return of consolidation, this is where he calls upon the unique properties of the triad to provide a resolution to preceding pitch conflicts of tonal uncertainties.”
“When trying to place Gorecki in the context of the wider history of Western music, commentators rarely call to mind the music of his contemporaries, except to draw usually spurious parallels with American minimalism or to make more meaningful comparisons with the output of composers such as Arvo Part (b. 1944, Estonia), Giya Kancheli (b. 1935, Georgia), and John Taverner (b. 1944, England). Even these comparisons, however, need to be treated carefully, mindful of the compositional chronology and the composer’s separate cultural environments. Gorecki himself has a quite different list of kindred souls, including Messiaen and Ives…Gorecki is drawn directly to…Bach, Haydn, Mozart. He feels a special affinity with Schubert, particularly in matters of tonal design and treatment of basic materials (these also suggest connections with Bruckner and Sibelius).”
“During the second half of the 1980s, he showed signs of becoming acutely aware of more intricate structural subtleties, still bound up in his habitual use of contrasting blocks (in truth, he was returning to the more complex evolving structures of the serial period). The composer who above all has been influential in this development, both technically and expressively, has been Beethoven.”
Gorecki “is a truly striking, thoughtful, and passionate individual who throughout his eventful life has single-mindedly pursued his own musical goals, remaining true to himself and his musical ethos, constantly searching…” We hope the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas find this kind of passion in their music making.
Gorecki’s transition from strict serialism, which marked the tonal breakdown of Western Art music in the early 20th century, to pursue music-creation that was more harmonically tonal-centered, paved a way for many serious composers who were struggling to find their way forward. His 3rd Symphony gave a new generation hope from the harmonic ‘rupture’ of serialism. He found ways to include the techniques derived from serialism, bringing them into harmonically-centered and emotionally expressive composition. Although he employs a good deal of repetition in his works, it becomes varied and avoids being in any way like the minimalism of Glass, Reich, or Adams. Throughout his career, regardless of what techniques he used, his music remains uniquely warm and folk-like, harkening back to his Polish heritage.