Radioheadov Jonny Greenwood radi već neko vrijeme izvrsnu filmsku muziku. Najnovija je za film The Master. Povrh toga, popločava sebi i mramornu stazu prema "pravom kompozitoru": sa slavnim Krzysztofom Pendereckim, svojim idolom, izdao je album Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima / Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Polymorphia / 48 Responses to Polymorphia, na kojem su njegove Popcorn Superhet Receiver i 48 Responses to Polymorphia "odogovori" na kompozicije Pendereckog. Spominje nadahnuće idejom o eteričnim ali sveprisutnim elektromagnetskim zrakama koje se pretvaraju u zvuk.
Fantazmagorije kratkovalnog radija. Jonny Tesla Greenwood Superconductor.
There Will Be Blood:
We Need To Talk About Kevin:
Norvegian Wood:
S Pendereckim - 48 Responses to Polymorphia
(a onda i: Greenwod, Penderecki & Aphex Twin)
How do you capture the energy — both positive and negative — of the past 50 years by using instruments perfected in the 18th century and made of wood, glue and horsehair?
That challenge lies at the very heart of this album, which brings together one of rock and electronic music's superheroes, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, with one of his own idols: the septuagenarian Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. The collection features two string pieces written by the elder composer, 1960's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and 1961's Polymorphia for 48 strings, juxtaposed with two of Greenwood's similarly set answers to Penderecki's work: Popcorn Superhet Receiver (inspired by Threnody) and 48 Responses to Polymorphia. Here, they both choose to use a seemingly antiquated vehicle — orchestral strings — to convey the noise, chaos and energy of our time. The results are ear-tingling.
Penderecki is an idol to Greenwood: In a recent charming joint interview with the London Guardian, Greenwood describes the unlikely duo's first meeting: "I shook his hand after a concert like a sad fan-boy." But there's no fan-boyism here: What we hear on this album is a meeting of two artistic visionaries connected in a real dialogue, the decades separating their work and their chronological ages all but collapsed and deflated. Recorded in Kraków after a joint performance of their music last September, the performances are by Poland's AUKSO Ensemble with the composers' direct oversight; Penderecki conducted his own scores, while violinist, chamber musician and conductor Marek Moś led the group for Greenwood's pieces.
Penderecki's Threnody originally carried a thoroughly abstract and deliberately unevocative title: 8'37" (a nod to composer John Cage's infamous 4'33"); it was only after the piece premiered that Penderecki linked his work explicitly to the horror of the atom bomb, though the piece's howls of anguish, expressed in all kinds of screams, rumbles and wails, speak clearly enough. The title change struck some observers as an opportunistic move, but the piece's popularity — and Penderecki's renown — skyrocketed after the name switch.
Written in 2005 with 34 individual string parts, and written as a response to Threnody, Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver takes its name and inspiration from shortwave radio: It's the sharply articulated chaos of 34 individuals often going on their own trajectories, not the tightly controlled, gleaming unified mass that one might traditionally associate with classical players.
Penderecki's Polymorphia also had a fascinating birth. The composer played a recording of Threnody for patients with mental illnesses at the Krakow Medical Center while the patients had encephalographs (brain-wave charts) made; he then based Polymorphia's musical lines around the shapes on their charts. In his reply to Polymorphia, Greenwood takes up that big, glorious and triumphant C Major chord — and then shatters that harmonic glow into smithereens. He begins with a strangely Bach-reminiscent chorale ("Es Ist Genug," or "It Is Enough," which is also the name of a famous Bach chorale) that Greenwood then distorts and dissolves over and over again. He builds tension and lets it drain away, takes up an idea and then lets it go in swirling eddies of motion. - Anastasia Tsioulcas
Krzysztof Penderecki/Jonny Greenwood,
Threnody / Popcorn / Polymorphia / 48 Responses [Nonesuch; 2012]
Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead), prominent figures in music from different generations, traditions, and cultures, meet in the blurring epistemological circumscriptions of the two mega-genres of Western music — popular music and so-called classical music — by means of this set of concise, non-chronological, complementary compositions for string instruments. The album, officially titled Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima / Popcorn Superhet Receiver / Polymorphia / 48 Responses to Polymorphia, is not ‘new’ as in being ‘groundbreaking’ music for 2012, and therefore it does not fall into the trap of musical experimentation as the only conceivable path to take in contemporary music (a path propelled by the deceiving notion of aesthetic progress and artistic evolution). This album is also not ‘new’ as in previously unpublished music (thus dismissing the notion of novelty as a fulfillment of consumerist desire): Penderecki’s compositions are already canonical, and Greenwood’s contributions have shown up in different media in the last few years. However, the juxtaposition of these musical pieces is radically unique, constituting a forceful statement that’s both symbolic and factual, a diagnosis of past and current music in an unified ground regulated by the notion of sonorism: sound matter as the source of forms, textures, patterns and dynamic substance.
In 1971, the year Greenwood was born, Penderecki premiered the second installment of his seminal piece De Natura Sonoris (on the nature of sound). With these works, he referred to the innate quality of sound that can be traced back to the origin of the universe as a sonic event, a big explosion, whose vibrations still resonate as cosmic background noise and from which any other possible sound is derived and inscribed. Taking the infinite timbral possibilities of electronic music combined with the organic quality of traditional Western orchestral instruments, Penderecki’s approach gave priority to the natural over the artificial, to perception over reason, creating a more holistic means to summon musical sounds freed from their historical roles and the constriction of genres. But while the Polish composer addressed the primeval origins of sound, Greenwood has always explored them in their embodied form (e.g., Bodysong), exploring and pushing the limits of conventional and atypical instruments within different outputs. The music of both composers has also been widely employed in films, not only for enhancing the possible cinematic effect, but also for helping to shape the core of their concept: Penderecki’s music outlines its otherworldly quality (The Exorcist), conveys the uncannily enigmatic (Inland Empire), and forms a maze of deranged mental components (The Shining). On the other hand, Greenwood’s music displaces notions of clichéd passionate feelings (Norwegian Wood, We Need To Talk About Kevin). Yet among all the concepts and musical techniques that connect Penderecki and Greenwood, the tone cluster brings further implications at different levels.
It starts in 1915 with Charles Ives, the American prophet of the avant-garde, who (inspired by the intellectual and philosophical transcendentalist thought of New England) expanded the established concept of multitudes as dispersed collectivities without physical proximity, interpreting them musically as heterophonies: multiple voices, each individual making their best effort according to their capabilities. The tone cluster emerged as a metaphor for an ideal society in the pinnacle of the modern era, chords of adjacent notes not necessarily in agreement but coexisting in unity. Ives employed the cluster in his piece “The Masses” (also called “Majority”), where a mixed choir — the majority, the masses — overcomes the harmonic dissonant oppression of the clustered orchestral background through a solid, unanimous line: “the Masses are singing […] the Masses are dreaming […] all will be well with the World.” After a tense global political struggle — endorsed by technological and scientific development — showed the possibility of manipulating the masses physically and ideologically, this chimera of the majorities ended on August 6, 1945 with a blinding flash of light and a deafening roar. Instead, mass destruction, genocide, and policide became a new possibility for the applied concept of the multitudes.
Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” from 1959, a quintessential creation of 20th-century music, represents perfectly this modernist debacle by introducing a tragic twist on the tone cluster: 52 strings shrieking in unison, every instrument in isolated suffering becoming part of the sound mass of moaning glissandi dissolving slowly into dissonant agony. Even fear or panic was annihilated by the instantaneous nature of this horrendous event, and thus metrical notation is no longer needed; in this threnody, events are inscribed directly into a frantic temporal frame. Among tens of recordings of this colossal poem of mourning, this version performed by the AUKSO Orchestra (conducted by Penderecki himself) is particularly violent, emphasizing the percussive attacks and affliction of the strings.
Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” is modeled musically after Penderecki’s “Threnody,” and it is conceptually inspired by the idea of ethereal but omnipresent electromagnetic waves being transduced to sound. Here, the tone cluster emerges again, showing its inner contraventions, the string mass fighting against itself continuously, with some peaceful moments of accordance briefly releasing the permanent scabrous tension. “Part 2 B” goes even further, constituting a thesaurus of extended bowing techniques. It can be proposed that some fragments of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” were not merely employed as a soundtrack to There Will Be Blood; rather, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s images of desolation and latent violence could actually work as a videoclip to Greenwood’s music (image subordinated to sound, not the other way around), which calmly foresees the unavoidable events to come in the proto-capitalist society.
The second pair of pieces follow a similar complementary logic. Penderecki’s “Polymorphia” (multiple forms) slowly departs from a quiet, low-pitched molecular state to a higher density domain marked by the perpetual mobility and inconstancy of sound, consummating a grotesque, ever-changing sonority developed paradoxically within a concrete structure. For this piece, Penderecki employed notation derived from electroencephalograms, some of them actually taken from patients listening to his “Threnody.” These neural oscillations relate to the cognitive mechanisms that trigger emotions in response to auditory stimuli, and Penderecki translates again this electrical activity into concrete sounds, displaying the brain as the ultimate filter. The final resolving chord of “Polymorphia” defines the vertebrae for Greenwood’s responses. Starting with the Elgarian pragmatic temperance of “Es is Genug” and perhaps inspired by Penderecki’s idea of rhythm interpreted as temporal mobility, Greenwood creates a variety of perplexing pictures, sometimes searching for an economy of language, a non-discursive discourse, that gives importance to individual timbres and encapsulated events (“Baton Sparks”, “Scan”) or insist on the repetition of motifs (“Overhang”). In “Three Oak Leaves,” each instrument portrays a vein in a leaf, ramifying and forming pathways for the vascular flow of sound, going from the solemnly tonal to an overwhelming, frenzied fluidity, to a trembling, palpitating pattern. “Pacay Tree” rabidly finishes this piece through punctual strokes, intriguing pizzicato, and shaky, atonal sound.
Penderecki’s dramatic utterance and Greenwood’s practical resolution conspicuously expose the way life in modernity has been shaped to become completely clustered: there are no individual tones forming a discernible and coherent continuum of melodic subjectivity. However, they also surpass this allegorical region to expose the contradiction of scales inherent to sound (the cosmic buried deep inside the biotic, as visually shown by Shin Katan’s pensive cover art) and its inseparable perceptual base. Indeed, before reaching the auditory cortex and being processed in higher cognitive levels — before being rationally labeled and classified — sound comes into existence in the ear canal. This is the place where Penderecki and Greenwood vindicate, where their sonic matter primarily acts. Certainly, Western musical tradition has ignored the middle and inner ear, regions of pure physicality where touch and hearing are part of the same mechanosensation and virtually indistinguishable from each other, where waves vibrate and resonate with the same ranking, independent of their source. Therefore, this album distances from any collaboration or ‘fusion’ that still departs from the premise of bridging two different worlds: what Greenwood and Penderecki make clear throughout is that they are not dissimilar and cohabit within the same confines, no matter the compositional techniques or chosen instrumentation (for example, pieces such as Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” and Olivier Messiaen’s Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus share the same place of inception), reflecting at the same time a positive crisis that could eventually lead to the dismantlement of a fictional framework. Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood are cultivating a dialogue of past, present, and future ideas, presented as potential energy for creation — and also for acquiring new ways of understanding music. - Carlos Román
Creation and destruction have been paradigms in art since Neolithic sculptures started crumbling under the ravages of war. The rapidly growing landscape that contemporary avant-garde music finds itself in provides the inevitable collision of these very concepts found in Krzysztof Penderecki‘s and Jonny Greenwood‘s work. The result is one of the most ambitious albums of the year so far.
Penderecki–the musical pride of Poland–and his tremendous oeuvre of beautifully devastating concertos and requiems are rarely paralleled but often overlooked by young music fans, yet anyone familiar with the films The Exorcist, Inland Empire, and Children of Men have already heard Penderecki’s unsettling strings at work; perhaps his pieces felt most at home when Stanley Kubrick used several whole compositions of his in The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Greenwood, the gangly guitarist in a small band from Oxfordshire, has joined the ranks of other rock stars like Trent Reznor who have become accomplished, innovative film composers. While his sullen, jazzy pieces in the abstract documentary Bodysong would’ve fit nicely on Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Greenwood’s unique prowess as an English composer has taken shape at an incredible pace, allowing him opportunities to mold critically acclaimed soundtracks for recent films We Need to Talk About Kevin, Norwegian Wood, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
These two masterminds of tone clusters and harmonic discordance have been dancing around each other’s work for years. Aside from both their stark pieces being weaponized by similar directors, Greenwood’s own rabid fascination with Penderecki’s work is what allows this treasure of an album to exist in the first place; his self-admitted fanboy-ism has resulted in crucial meet-ups and inspired compositions, as well as a momentous joint concert in Wroclaw last year (where much of the material re-recorded for this album was performed).
Greenwood’s modern, literal responses to Penderecki’s work from decades ago fit exquisitely next to the old master’s pieces. Penderecki’s sonic wrecking ball “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” pushes through several bouts of calms and tumults, with violas and cellos raging, becoming a sinister push-pull of notes before exploding into a supernova of musical warfare and fizzling out. Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”, performed here by the AUSKO Chamber Orchestra with more nuanced gusto than the famed 2005 BBC performance of the piece, is his optimistic answer to “Threnody”. Greenwood builds with the pieces left shattered by his idol, and, just as the aforementioned piece may now symbolize the harrowing results of nuclear conflict, “Popcorn”, now immortalized by images of Daniel Day-Lewis sneering, evokes both primordial beginnings and splendid growth, and Greenwood here fully blooms, owning the fact that he’s the man who sought to sabotage “Creep” with fits of dead guitar chugs before the song’s refrain.
“Popcorn” is broken up into parts, traveling through an earthy dance of hoedown grooves and staccato plucking, recalling the same primitive rhythms and swirling tension that Stravinsky premiered in 1913 for “The Rite of Spring”. The final part features a weathered return to earlier themes, culminating in a majestic 7th-note swell that acts as a hopeful response to the carnage previously left by Greenwood’s hero.
“Polymorphia” signals the return of Penderecki, as he piles up layers of ominous strings for three minutes straight, transforming quaint-looking, centuries-old instruments into clamoring dogs and humans alike. Adding to the recursive, technology-revering nature of this album, the piece, composed in the 60s, is actually based on psychiatric patients’ brainwave responses to his own “Threnody”. It descends into a lethargically menacing undercurrent of clawing notes and low vibrations and climaxes in frightening tides of vicious tones followed by a C-major blast so refreshing that it’s the most insidious and outrageous moment on the record. (Strangely, “Polymorphia” mirrors The Beatles’ noise-bubble finale of Sgt. Pepper’s, though the Liverpool quartet wrote “A Day in the Life” several years after the piece.)
Greenwood takes that final C note and lets his imagination run wild with it in the responses that follow, providing not a set of plagiarized send-offs but completely new ideas going in different directions. Highlighting Greenwood’s strength in drawing musical sketches, brief responses like “Es Is Genug”, “Three Oak Leaves”, and “Overhang” flirt with traditional, stoic arrangements, while “Scan”, “Pacay Tree”, and “Ranj” employ shaky percussion, fragile dissonance, and Eastern harmony, resembling Koji Endo’s scores for Japanese horror films Gozu and Audition.
While Greenwood seems poised to continue successfully writing his own scores alongside polarizing Radiohead albums, his collaboration with his living inspiration stands as a testament to his own compositional dexterity, Penderecki’s legacy, and the pairing of old and new, chaos and creation. - David DiLillo
It wasn't the most auspicious of meetings: "I shook his hand after a concert like a sad fan-boy." Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's creative catalyst, one of the world's great guitarists, and floppy-haired pin-up boy for the musically adventurous even in his early 40s, is talking about 78-year-old Polish classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki. For most of the musical world, it would be Greenwood who had the star quality rather than Poland's most eminent living composer – even if Penderecki did break creative barriers in the 1950s and 60s that are still rocking Greenwood's world. In fact, Greenwood's obsessive enthusiasm for Penderecki's music, especially his still radical early work, has brought the sounds of musical modernism to new audiences in ways Penderecki could only dream of.
Greenwood's fan-boyism has also resulted in a recent new work, 48 Responses to Polymorphia (the latter being Penderecki's 1961 composition), a new CD, and a live concert, in collaboration with Penderecki himself. But for all that to happen, this musical odd couple had to meet again. Greenwood travelled to Penderecki's home outside Krakow, with its hundreds of acres of arboretum, and this time, Penderecki knew who he was. Sort of. "I was trying hard not to be intimidated or overly starstruck," Greenwood says, "and he was trying very hard to put me at my ease, which made me even more anxious. I kind of wish he had been more foreboding, but he's just very friendly." Penderecki also had his preconceptions shattered. "I didn't expect to meet somebody from pop music who was really quite a normal person," Penderecki laughs. "He dresses very normal, he has dignity and very good manners." Had Penderecki heard any Radiohead? "I told my granddaughter, and she knew immediately who they were. She is 11, and she and my children gave me some discs to hear their music. I like it very much; it is very soft, very musical. And after that, I heard that Jonny was inspired by me in other pieces he has composed."
Since 2004, Greenwood has written for the London Sinfonietta, for the BBC Concert Orchestra, where he was composer in residence, and for the AUKSO Chamber Orchestra that tours to London later this month. And then there are his soundtracks. If you have seen Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, you have already become familiar with Greenwood – music from another of his Penderecki-inspired pieces, 2005's Popcorn Superhet Receiver, saturates his score for the movie.
Penderecki says that he has to thank Greenwood for introducing his music to a new generation of young people: when 48 Responses was premiered in Wroclaw last year, 9,000 young people packed the auditorium, "and they had never heard about this old guy Penderecki's music".
So what is it about Penderecki that Greenwood finds so inspiring? "His pieces make such wonderful sounds. And it is a beautiful experience to hear them live. Of all the composers whose music suffers from what recording does, Penderecki is one of the biggest casualties. I think a lot of people might think his work is stridently dissonant or painful on the ears. But because of the complexity of what's happening – particularly in pieces such as Threnody and Polymorphia, and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you're there. It's not like listening to feedback, and it's not dissonant. It's something else. It's a celebration of so many people making music together and it's like – wow, you're watching that happen."
That is what the real lesson of Greenwood's work with orchestras has been. "The big message has been that I have fallen out of love with recordings of orchestras. Despite what hi-fi magazines tell you about how much money you should spend on your speakers, you're not there, you're not in the hall. Because when you are really there, and you hear an orchestra start up, it's like nothing else. That richness filling the room, that's my motivation right now. I'm really hung up on avoiding speakers and electricity."
Hang on a minute – Jonny Greenwood, programmer extraordinaire, guitar-obsessive, new-sound junkie, wants to give up electricity and electronics? "I know I'm being massively hypocritical, because yes, I spend hours and hours programming computers trying to create these things, and I still love doing that. But I keep coming back to orchestras and thinking, that's amazing. And if you've got all those musicians in the room, why would you want a laptop, or want it all coming out of speakers?"
There are ironies on ironies here. Penderecki's Polymorphia, composed in 1961, couldn't have been written without the Polish composer's experience of early electronics studios. And some of the detail of the piece is based on something that seems straight out of a sci-fi movie: Penderecki wired up psychiatric patients to encephalogram machines and played them an earlier piece of his, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and then translated the graphs of their brain-waves as they reacted to the music into the textures of Polymorphia. Greenwood has his own lo-fi homage to that idea in his 48 Responses. Partly also in tribute to Penderecki's love of trees, Greenwood found an oak leaf in his garden, and transformed the contours of its veins and sinews into musical material. Fake Plastic Trees no more … "I hope he sees it as a gesture of affection," he says, "but it might be one of those things that looks better on paper. I only let that part play for about 30 seconds of the 20-minute piece."
Greenwood admits, "there is something retro about what I'm doing, but I also think there's something that is still exciting and relevant in writing for orchestras. It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the 60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it's feels more modern to me. And that's why Penderecki's early music, and the whole thing of writing for orchestras, still feels very modern. If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing."
Jonny Greenwood, saviour of the orchestra – why not?
All of this has an impact on Radiohead, too, with Greenwood's ceaseless quest to make the band's sonic palette as flexible as any orchestra. They are about to tour the US, which is the best time Greenwood finds to write his film scores and orchestral music, "instead of doing something healthy such as going to the gym or seeing exciting people. It's the perfect situation to work." He shows me a music notebook he's been filling with sketches for the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie he is scoring. "I've sort of learned grownup music handwriting. I used to colour in crotchets with my tongue out" – he mimes a pose of schoolboyish concentration – "but a few years ago I finally sped up."
But Greenwood doesn't need any false modesty when it comes to his classical pieces. His 48 Responses isn't just a good piece for a composer who is more used to the studio, it is a dazzlingly imaginative, gripping and novel work, full stop. Don't just take my word for it: Penderecki thinks so too: "None of what Jonny does is a copy of what I have done. Even his notation is different from mine. He does things that I haven't done, and has gone in a different direction using some elements of my music. He is very gifted. I like his music very much." Who's the fan-boy now?- Tom Service
The transformation of Radiohead from a rock band that played drums and guitars into an experimental one is partly thanks to Jonny Greenwood’s obsession with the music of the 78-year-old Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.
Greenwood, the band’s guitarist and electronics mastermind, has studied classical music all his life. “I did three weeks at college just before Radiohead signed to EMI, and one of the lecturers played us some Penderecki and said 'orchestras can sound like this too’,” he recalls. “That was my idea of what contemporary music was for a long time.”
Twenty years later, Greenwood’s fascination with Penderecki has blossomed into a vigorous professional partnership. Greenwood had only met the composer fleetingly after a performance in London, but last September two concerts were staged in Poland, featuring Penderecki’s early-Sixties pieces Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima and Polymorphia, alongside Greenwood’s newly written 48 Responses to Polymorphia. The same programme will be repeated in London next week, and Nonesuch records is releasing a CD.
Penderecki himself has also oscillated between electronica and more traditional formats. Threnody and Polymorphia – milestones in the history of the avant-garde – were created for conventional instruments after their author had experimented with electronic music-making in Warsaw in the late Fifties.
“I fell in love with electronics, which for me was the terra incognita, because I had never heard such sounds,” he says. “If you’d asked me 50 years ago, I would have said the future of music is only electronic, but I would have been wrong. I learnt how to produce everything I needed with live instrumentalists, so I don’t need electronics.”
Penderecki invented a range of techniques for squeezing fresh sounds out of orthodox instruments, such as experimenting with vibrato, playing on the bridge or tailpiece of cellos and double basses and playing at dog-whistle pitch. This fired Greenwood with new excitement about the possibilities of the traditional orchestra, so he was thrilled when in 2004 he was recruited by Radio 3’s controller Roger Wright to be the BBC’s composer in residence, after Wright had heard some string quartet music he’d written for the movie Bodysong. As a result he was given generous chunks of time to rehearse with the BBC Concert Orchestra. “It’s amazing and unheard of, getting an orchestra to have a workshop with,” he says. His first BBC-sponsored composition in 2005 was Popcorn Superhet Receiver (its title refers to short-wave radio), inspired by Penderecki’s Threnody.
Portions of the piece were included in his score for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed film. Once again he must have felt Penderecki looking over his shoulder: the Polish maestro’s music has been used in a string of landmark movies from The Exorcist and The Shining to Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.
“There Will Be Blood convinced people that I knew how to do film music,” says Greenwood. “I would send stuff to Paul Thomas Anderson and say 'this is about the landscape or the sky’ or he’d say 'write something aggressive and a bit like Jaws’.”
His reputation means that, he says, “I can pretty much do what I want. I’m pampered like you wouldn’t believe.”
Sounds like a pretty good job, I say. “The best,” he agrees. - Adam Sweeting
In 1971, the year Greenwood was born, Penderecki premiered the second installment of his seminal piece De Natura Sonoris (on the nature of sound). With these works, he referred to the innate quality of sound that can be traced back to the origin of the universe as a sonic event, a big explosion, whose vibrations still resonate as cosmic background noise and from which any other possible sound is derived and inscribed. Taking the infinite timbral possibilities of electronic music combined with the organic quality of traditional Western orchestral instruments, Penderecki’s approach gave priority to the natural over the artificial, to perception over reason, creating a more holistic means to summon musical sounds freed from their historical roles and the constriction of genres. But while the Polish composer addressed the primeval origins of sound, Greenwood has always explored them in their embodied form (e.g., Bodysong), exploring and pushing the limits of conventional and atypical instruments within different outputs. The music of both composers has also been widely employed in films, not only for enhancing the possible cinematic effect, but also for helping to shape the core of their concept: Penderecki’s music outlines its otherworldly quality (The Exorcist), conveys the uncannily enigmatic (Inland Empire), and forms a maze of deranged mental components (The Shining). On the other hand, Greenwood’s music displaces notions of clichéd passionate feelings (Norwegian Wood, We Need To Talk About Kevin). Yet among all the concepts and musical techniques that connect Penderecki and Greenwood, the tone cluster brings further implications at different levels.
It starts in 1915 with Charles Ives, the American prophet of the avant-garde, who (inspired by the intellectual and philosophical transcendentalist thought of New England) expanded the established concept of multitudes as dispersed collectivities without physical proximity, interpreting them musically as heterophonies: multiple voices, each individual making their best effort according to their capabilities. The tone cluster emerged as a metaphor for an ideal society in the pinnacle of the modern era, chords of adjacent notes not necessarily in agreement but coexisting in unity. Ives employed the cluster in his piece “The Masses” (also called “Majority”), where a mixed choir — the majority, the masses — overcomes the harmonic dissonant oppression of the clustered orchestral background through a solid, unanimous line: “the Masses are singing […] the Masses are dreaming […] all will be well with the World.” After a tense global political struggle — endorsed by technological and scientific development — showed the possibility of manipulating the masses physically and ideologically, this chimera of the majorities ended on August 6, 1945 with a blinding flash of light and a deafening roar. Instead, mass destruction, genocide, and policide became a new possibility for the applied concept of the multitudes.
Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” from 1959, a quintessential creation of 20th-century music, represents perfectly this modernist debacle by introducing a tragic twist on the tone cluster: 52 strings shrieking in unison, every instrument in isolated suffering becoming part of the sound mass of moaning glissandi dissolving slowly into dissonant agony. Even fear or panic was annihilated by the instantaneous nature of this horrendous event, and thus metrical notation is no longer needed; in this threnody, events are inscribed directly into a frantic temporal frame. Among tens of recordings of this colossal poem of mourning, this version performed by the AUKSO Orchestra (conducted by Penderecki himself) is particularly violent, emphasizing the percussive attacks and affliction of the strings.
Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” is modeled musically after Penderecki’s “Threnody,” and it is conceptually inspired by the idea of ethereal but omnipresent electromagnetic waves being transduced to sound. Here, the tone cluster emerges again, showing its inner contraventions, the string mass fighting against itself continuously, with some peaceful moments of accordance briefly releasing the permanent scabrous tension. “Part 2 B” goes even further, constituting a thesaurus of extended bowing techniques. It can be proposed that some fragments of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” were not merely employed as a soundtrack to There Will Be Blood; rather, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s images of desolation and latent violence could actually work as a videoclip to Greenwood’s music (image subordinated to sound, not the other way around), which calmly foresees the unavoidable events to come in the proto-capitalist society.
The second pair of pieces follow a similar complementary logic. Penderecki’s “Polymorphia” (multiple forms) slowly departs from a quiet, low-pitched molecular state to a higher density domain marked by the perpetual mobility and inconstancy of sound, consummating a grotesque, ever-changing sonority developed paradoxically within a concrete structure. For this piece, Penderecki employed notation derived from electroencephalograms, some of them actually taken from patients listening to his “Threnody.” These neural oscillations relate to the cognitive mechanisms that trigger emotions in response to auditory stimuli, and Penderecki translates again this electrical activity into concrete sounds, displaying the brain as the ultimate filter. The final resolving chord of “Polymorphia” defines the vertebrae for Greenwood’s responses. Starting with the Elgarian pragmatic temperance of “Es is Genug” and perhaps inspired by Penderecki’s idea of rhythm interpreted as temporal mobility, Greenwood creates a variety of perplexing pictures, sometimes searching for an economy of language, a non-discursive discourse, that gives importance to individual timbres and encapsulated events (“Baton Sparks”, “Scan”) or insist on the repetition of motifs (“Overhang”). In “Three Oak Leaves,” each instrument portrays a vein in a leaf, ramifying and forming pathways for the vascular flow of sound, going from the solemnly tonal to an overwhelming, frenzied fluidity, to a trembling, palpitating pattern. “Pacay Tree” rabidly finishes this piece through punctual strokes, intriguing pizzicato, and shaky, atonal sound.
Penderecki’s dramatic utterance and Greenwood’s practical resolution conspicuously expose the way life in modernity has been shaped to become completely clustered: there are no individual tones forming a discernible and coherent continuum of melodic subjectivity. However, they also surpass this allegorical region to expose the contradiction of scales inherent to sound (the cosmic buried deep inside the biotic, as visually shown by Shin Katan’s pensive cover art) and its inseparable perceptual base. Indeed, before reaching the auditory cortex and being processed in higher cognitive levels — before being rationally labeled and classified — sound comes into existence in the ear canal. This is the place where Penderecki and Greenwood vindicate, where their sonic matter primarily acts. Certainly, Western musical tradition has ignored the middle and inner ear, regions of pure physicality where touch and hearing are part of the same mechanosensation and virtually indistinguishable from each other, where waves vibrate and resonate with the same ranking, independent of their source. Therefore, this album distances from any collaboration or ‘fusion’ that still departs from the premise of bridging two different worlds: what Greenwood and Penderecki make clear throughout is that they are not dissimilar and cohabit within the same confines, no matter the compositional techniques or chosen instrumentation (for example, pieces such as Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” and Olivier Messiaen’s Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus share the same place of inception), reflecting at the same time a positive crisis that could eventually lead to the dismantlement of a fictional framework. Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood are cultivating a dialogue of past, present, and future ideas, presented as potential energy for creation — and also for acquiring new ways of understanding music. - Carlos Román
Creation and destruction have been paradigms in art since Neolithic sculptures started crumbling under the ravages of war. The rapidly growing landscape that contemporary avant-garde music finds itself in provides the inevitable collision of these very concepts found in Krzysztof Penderecki‘s and Jonny Greenwood‘s work. The result is one of the most ambitious albums of the year so far.
Penderecki–the musical pride of Poland–and his tremendous oeuvre of beautifully devastating concertos and requiems are rarely paralleled but often overlooked by young music fans, yet anyone familiar with the films The Exorcist, Inland Empire, and Children of Men have already heard Penderecki’s unsettling strings at work; perhaps his pieces felt most at home when Stanley Kubrick used several whole compositions of his in The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Greenwood, the gangly guitarist in a small band from Oxfordshire, has joined the ranks of other rock stars like Trent Reznor who have become accomplished, innovative film composers. While his sullen, jazzy pieces in the abstract documentary Bodysong would’ve fit nicely on Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Greenwood’s unique prowess as an English composer has taken shape at an incredible pace, allowing him opportunities to mold critically acclaimed soundtracks for recent films We Need to Talk About Kevin, Norwegian Wood, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.
These two masterminds of tone clusters and harmonic discordance have been dancing around each other’s work for years. Aside from both their stark pieces being weaponized by similar directors, Greenwood’s own rabid fascination with Penderecki’s work is what allows this treasure of an album to exist in the first place; his self-admitted fanboy-ism has resulted in crucial meet-ups and inspired compositions, as well as a momentous joint concert in Wroclaw last year (where much of the material re-recorded for this album was performed).
Greenwood’s modern, literal responses to Penderecki’s work from decades ago fit exquisitely next to the old master’s pieces. Penderecki’s sonic wrecking ball “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” pushes through several bouts of calms and tumults, with violas and cellos raging, becoming a sinister push-pull of notes before exploding into a supernova of musical warfare and fizzling out. Greenwood’s “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”, performed here by the AUSKO Chamber Orchestra with more nuanced gusto than the famed 2005 BBC performance of the piece, is his optimistic answer to “Threnody”. Greenwood builds with the pieces left shattered by his idol, and, just as the aforementioned piece may now symbolize the harrowing results of nuclear conflict, “Popcorn”, now immortalized by images of Daniel Day-Lewis sneering, evokes both primordial beginnings and splendid growth, and Greenwood here fully blooms, owning the fact that he’s the man who sought to sabotage “Creep” with fits of dead guitar chugs before the song’s refrain.
“Popcorn” is broken up into parts, traveling through an earthy dance of hoedown grooves and staccato plucking, recalling the same primitive rhythms and swirling tension that Stravinsky premiered in 1913 for “The Rite of Spring”. The final part features a weathered return to earlier themes, culminating in a majestic 7th-note swell that acts as a hopeful response to the carnage previously left by Greenwood’s hero.
“Polymorphia” signals the return of Penderecki, as he piles up layers of ominous strings for three minutes straight, transforming quaint-looking, centuries-old instruments into clamoring dogs and humans alike. Adding to the recursive, technology-revering nature of this album, the piece, composed in the 60s, is actually based on psychiatric patients’ brainwave responses to his own “Threnody”. It descends into a lethargically menacing undercurrent of clawing notes and low vibrations and climaxes in frightening tides of vicious tones followed by a C-major blast so refreshing that it’s the most insidious and outrageous moment on the record. (Strangely, “Polymorphia” mirrors The Beatles’ noise-bubble finale of Sgt. Pepper’s, though the Liverpool quartet wrote “A Day in the Life” several years after the piece.)
Greenwood takes that final C note and lets his imagination run wild with it in the responses that follow, providing not a set of plagiarized send-offs but completely new ideas going in different directions. Highlighting Greenwood’s strength in drawing musical sketches, brief responses like “Es Is Genug”, “Three Oak Leaves”, and “Overhang” flirt with traditional, stoic arrangements, while “Scan”, “Pacay Tree”, and “Ranj” employ shaky percussion, fragile dissonance, and Eastern harmony, resembling Koji Endo’s scores for Japanese horror films Gozu and Audition.
While Greenwood seems poised to continue successfully writing his own scores alongside polarizing Radiohead albums, his collaboration with his living inspiration stands as a testament to his own compositional dexterity, Penderecki’s legacy, and the pairing of old and new, chaos and creation. - David DiLillo
It wasn't the most auspicious of meetings: "I shook his hand after a concert like a sad fan-boy." Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead's creative catalyst, one of the world's great guitarists, and floppy-haired pin-up boy for the musically adventurous even in his early 40s, is talking about 78-year-old Polish classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki. For most of the musical world, it would be Greenwood who had the star quality rather than Poland's most eminent living composer – even if Penderecki did break creative barriers in the 1950s and 60s that are still rocking Greenwood's world. In fact, Greenwood's obsessive enthusiasm for Penderecki's music, especially his still radical early work, has brought the sounds of musical modernism to new audiences in ways Penderecki could only dream of.
Greenwood's fan-boyism has also resulted in a recent new work, 48 Responses to Polymorphia (the latter being Penderecki's 1961 composition), a new CD, and a live concert, in collaboration with Penderecki himself. But for all that to happen, this musical odd couple had to meet again. Greenwood travelled to Penderecki's home outside Krakow, with its hundreds of acres of arboretum, and this time, Penderecki knew who he was. Sort of. "I was trying hard not to be intimidated or overly starstruck," Greenwood says, "and he was trying very hard to put me at my ease, which made me even more anxious. I kind of wish he had been more foreboding, but he's just very friendly." Penderecki also had his preconceptions shattered. "I didn't expect to meet somebody from pop music who was really quite a normal person," Penderecki laughs. "He dresses very normal, he has dignity and very good manners." Had Penderecki heard any Radiohead? "I told my granddaughter, and she knew immediately who they were. She is 11, and she and my children gave me some discs to hear their music. I like it very much; it is very soft, very musical. And after that, I heard that Jonny was inspired by me in other pieces he has composed."
Since 2004, Greenwood has written for the London Sinfonietta, for the BBC Concert Orchestra, where he was composer in residence, and for the AUKSO Chamber Orchestra that tours to London later this month. And then there are his soundtracks. If you have seen Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, you have already become familiar with Greenwood – music from another of his Penderecki-inspired pieces, 2005's Popcorn Superhet Receiver, saturates his score for the movie.
Penderecki says that he has to thank Greenwood for introducing his music to a new generation of young people: when 48 Responses was premiered in Wroclaw last year, 9,000 young people packed the auditorium, "and they had never heard about this old guy Penderecki's music".
So what is it about Penderecki that Greenwood finds so inspiring? "His pieces make such wonderful sounds. And it is a beautiful experience to hear them live. Of all the composers whose music suffers from what recording does, Penderecki is one of the biggest casualties. I think a lot of people might think his work is stridently dissonant or painful on the ears. But because of the complexity of what's happening – particularly in pieces such as Threnody and Polymorphia, and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you're there. It's not like listening to feedback, and it's not dissonant. It's something else. It's a celebration of so many people making music together and it's like – wow, you're watching that happen."
That is what the real lesson of Greenwood's work with orchestras has been. "The big message has been that I have fallen out of love with recordings of orchestras. Despite what hi-fi magazines tell you about how much money you should spend on your speakers, you're not there, you're not in the hall. Because when you are really there, and you hear an orchestra start up, it's like nothing else. That richness filling the room, that's my motivation right now. I'm really hung up on avoiding speakers and electricity."
Hang on a minute – Jonny Greenwood, programmer extraordinaire, guitar-obsessive, new-sound junkie, wants to give up electricity and electronics? "I know I'm being massively hypocritical, because yes, I spend hours and hours programming computers trying to create these things, and I still love doing that. But I keep coming back to orchestras and thinking, that's amazing. And if you've got all those musicians in the room, why would you want a laptop, or want it all coming out of speakers?"
There are ironies on ironies here. Penderecki's Polymorphia, composed in 1961, couldn't have been written without the Polish composer's experience of early electronics studios. And some of the detail of the piece is based on something that seems straight out of a sci-fi movie: Penderecki wired up psychiatric patients to encephalogram machines and played them an earlier piece of his, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and then translated the graphs of their brain-waves as they reacted to the music into the textures of Polymorphia. Greenwood has his own lo-fi homage to that idea in his 48 Responses. Partly also in tribute to Penderecki's love of trees, Greenwood found an oak leaf in his garden, and transformed the contours of its veins and sinews into musical material. Fake Plastic Trees no more … "I hope he sees it as a gesture of affection," he says, "but it might be one of those things that looks better on paper. I only let that part play for about 30 seconds of the 20-minute piece."
Greenwood admits, "there is something retro about what I'm doing, but I also think there's something that is still exciting and relevant in writing for orchestras. It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the 60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it's feels more modern to me. And that's why Penderecki's early music, and the whole thing of writing for orchestras, still feels very modern. If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing."
Jonny Greenwood, saviour of the orchestra – why not?
All of this has an impact on Radiohead, too, with Greenwood's ceaseless quest to make the band's sonic palette as flexible as any orchestra. They are about to tour the US, which is the best time Greenwood finds to write his film scores and orchestral music, "instead of doing something healthy such as going to the gym or seeing exciting people. It's the perfect situation to work." He shows me a music notebook he's been filling with sketches for the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie he is scoring. "I've sort of learned grownup music handwriting. I used to colour in crotchets with my tongue out" – he mimes a pose of schoolboyish concentration – "but a few years ago I finally sped up."
But Greenwood doesn't need any false modesty when it comes to his classical pieces. His 48 Responses isn't just a good piece for a composer who is more used to the studio, it is a dazzlingly imaginative, gripping and novel work, full stop. Don't just take my word for it: Penderecki thinks so too: "None of what Jonny does is a copy of what I have done. Even his notation is different from mine. He does things that I haven't done, and has gone in a different direction using some elements of my music. He is very gifted. I like his music very much." Who's the fan-boy now?- Tom Service
The transformation of Radiohead from a rock band that played drums and guitars into an experimental one is partly thanks to Jonny Greenwood’s obsession with the music of the 78-year-old Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.
Greenwood, the band’s guitarist and electronics mastermind, has studied classical music all his life. “I did three weeks at college just before Radiohead signed to EMI, and one of the lecturers played us some Penderecki and said 'orchestras can sound like this too’,” he recalls. “That was my idea of what contemporary music was for a long time.”
Twenty years later, Greenwood’s fascination with Penderecki has blossomed into a vigorous professional partnership. Greenwood had only met the composer fleetingly after a performance in London, but last September two concerts were staged in Poland, featuring Penderecki’s early-Sixties pieces Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima and Polymorphia, alongside Greenwood’s newly written 48 Responses to Polymorphia. The same programme will be repeated in London next week, and Nonesuch records is releasing a CD.
Penderecki himself has also oscillated between electronica and more traditional formats. Threnody and Polymorphia – milestones in the history of the avant-garde – were created for conventional instruments after their author had experimented with electronic music-making in Warsaw in the late Fifties.
“I fell in love with electronics, which for me was the terra incognita, because I had never heard such sounds,” he says. “If you’d asked me 50 years ago, I would have said the future of music is only electronic, but I would have been wrong. I learnt how to produce everything I needed with live instrumentalists, so I don’t need electronics.”
Penderecki invented a range of techniques for squeezing fresh sounds out of orthodox instruments, such as experimenting with vibrato, playing on the bridge or tailpiece of cellos and double basses and playing at dog-whistle pitch. This fired Greenwood with new excitement about the possibilities of the traditional orchestra, so he was thrilled when in 2004 he was recruited by Radio 3’s controller Roger Wright to be the BBC’s composer in residence, after Wright had heard some string quartet music he’d written for the movie Bodysong. As a result he was given generous chunks of time to rehearse with the BBC Concert Orchestra. “It’s amazing and unheard of, getting an orchestra to have a workshop with,” he says. His first BBC-sponsored composition in 2005 was Popcorn Superhet Receiver (its title refers to short-wave radio), inspired by Penderecki’s Threnody.
Portions of the piece were included in his score for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed film. Once again he must have felt Penderecki looking over his shoulder: the Polish maestro’s music has been used in a string of landmark movies from The Exorcist and The Shining to Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.
“There Will Be Blood convinced people that I knew how to do film music,” says Greenwood. “I would send stuff to Paul Thomas Anderson and say 'this is about the landscape or the sky’ or he’d say 'write something aggressive and a bit like Jaws’.”
His reputation means that, he says, “I can pretty much do what I want. I’m pampered like you wouldn’t believe.”
Sounds like a pretty good job, I say. “The best,” he agrees. - Adam Sweeting
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