Penderecki's most impressive score, To the Victims of Hiroshima: Threnody, for fifty-two strings, calls for a host of new methods of playing these instruments ... [and] ... the extremely violent, almost "anti-artistic" expression of the music justifies the means.
ELLIOTT CARTER, writing in 1963 about new music in Europe, Collected Essays and Lectures 1937-1995, U. of Rochester Press, p.36.
__________________________________
I must have heard at least a dozen concert recordings of Penderecki's Threnody (1960), and all but one presented this piece as a shrill Modernist tantrum of a young musical dissident behind the Iron Curtain. Heard in such performances, the music amounts to little more than an echo of Xenakis' Metastaseis (1954), making it easy to think that its continuing survival on the fringes of the orchestral repertoire is due solely to its contrived anti-American title.
Which is what I used to think before I discovered how poignant, even sensuous this music can sound when its avant-garde stylistic devices (swooping glissandi, tone clusters, behind the bridge bowing, etc.) are treated as background technical means to emotionally significant musical ends. I owe this discovery to the performance of Threnody by the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien under the impressively versatile Cornelius Meister, recorded in concert on 3 November 2016.
7 comments:
That’s often the way. Sometimes it can take a while for conductors and musicians to get to grips with a new work. Alternatively, the performance you mention might have taken more liberties with the score. I don’t know.
As “contemporary” music goes, Threnody is probably more mainstream than most - it’s the one piece by Penderecki that most people know, but due to recordings and probably its direct textural appeal, and title, though my recollection is that the latter came after the work was completed.
Hiroshima is synonymous with mass disembodiment and this music depicts the sudden departure of thousands of souls. This calamity remains the greatest act of genocide in my lifetime. I have never heard this piece until today and I'm glad I waited. The rush of ejected spirits amounts to a total eclipse of compassion. The music never allows the murdered to scream. Their cries are forever unuttered. I just hope I live to see my country apologize for this horrific act, and its sequel. This threnody is, in part, about the everlasting torment of that August morning--to my ears, at least.
David,
Whatever one's assessment of the Hiroshima bombing is, the Penderecki piece is certainly not about that (and could not be). You might want to take a look at my earlier post on this subject, if you had not done so already:
https://boomboomsky.blogspot.com/2011/11/those-who-should-have-known-better.html
I wonder if the peice would be as well-known if Penderecki had named it “Textural Study No. 1”. On the other hand, although the work was not directly inspired by Hiroshima, there’s no reason why the composer can’t have felt an affinity after he’d written it. There are various ways things can be named and areas of feeling identified, and no rule that one must precede the other. It’s not a straightforward business.
I'm going to plead the right to project on to the music my grave imaginings, courtesy of the piece's provocative and inviting title. Hiroshima remains the first death-star and there is no way to hear a threnody such as this without knowing what was unleashed that day. The music speaks for the tens of thousands deprived of their death-cries during this epochal and epic crime against humanity. I believe Penderecki would not fault me in the slightest for what I "hear."
David,
Of course people are entitled to hear whatever they like in any piece of music, regardless of titles or composers' intentions. (Creating elaborate programs for purely instrumental music was a big hobby among 19th century musicians from Liszt down.) As for the Penderecki piece, I would not be surprised if some Chinese music lovers hear in it the agony and death of hundreds of thousands of civilians raped and murdered by the Japanese troops during the 1937 occupation of Nanking.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre )
I, however, side with Rossini who once bragged about using the same music for a comic aria in an opera buffa and then later for a tragic aria in an opera seria. Since the said music worked well in both cases, this was enough for Rossini to conclude that music does not even have a fixed general emotional meaning, let alone specific meanings or messages ascribed to it by those who tend to 'hear' extramusical stuff in ordered pitch structures - e.g.,
https://boomboomsky.blogspot.com/2015/09/2-hates.html
In a way, this is a debate about the idea of absolute music, which has taken place at various times, particularly in the second half of the Nineteenth century. For a very good discussion of such matters, see: “Absolute Music - The History of an Idea” by Mark Evan Bonds (OUP, 2014).
Post a Comment