Quotes from Krzysztof Penderecki

I always had my roots in the past.

One should live with history round one.

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

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.

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.

It's no longer possible to find something which will shock other people, because everything has already been done.

After music, trees are my passion. My great-grandfather was a forester, so maybe it is genetic. My father would take me for walks in the forest and sometimes I would play truant with him. 'You won't learn anything in a communist school, my boy,' he would say. He loved trees too.

When Kubrick called me about 'The Shining,' it was very strange. He first asked me to write music for his film, but I instead gave him suggestions about some of my pieces. I told him about 'The Awakening of Jacob,' which he did use in 'The Shining.'

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

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!

So many new things have been discovered in the 20th century that now, at the end of the century, we need some kind of synthesis, some musical language which will allow us just to write music.

That is our dilemma in Poland. We don't like to be ruled by the East.

The 1960s were a time of cultural revolution in Poland. And I was a part of that revolution. For me, those years - the late 1950s and early 1960s - were the most fruitful.

Poland is my home, my roots are here. There is nowhere I would rather live.

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

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

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

In summer, I like to sit and compose on the porch, where I can see people come and go.

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

Composers are very individual creatures.

Poland is different from the other so-called socialist countries. We have a different background. Poland belongs to the West, not the East. We belong to the Mediterranean, Latin culture, not to the Byzantine, which is very different and which you find in Bulgaria and even parts of Czechoslovakia and, of course, Romania.

I must never change my way - because of critics who may not like it - I preserve my language and my style.

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

I have lived through very difficult times.