Quotes from Krzysztof Penderecki

Big forms fascinate me.

I think the best publicity I can get for my music is to conduct it.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

I'm really just a frustrated violinist.

With Orff it is text, text, text - the music always subordinate. Not so with me. In 'Magnificat,' the text is important, but in some places I'm writing just music and not caring about text. Sometimes I'm using extremely complicated polyphony where the text is completely buried. So no, I am not another Orff, and I'm not primitive.

I have written many works to accompany Old Church Slavonic texts.

I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.

Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.

I grew up at the time of Social Realism in Poland, when everyone was supposed to be 'writing for the workers.' But I soon became allergic to this. I have never written for audiences. I like it if they appreciate my music. But I would never change my style for them.

At school, I wrote in the style of the Dutch composers. After I graduated, a new style set in.

My music is rather abstract and maybe even strange-sounding for some people, so maybe that's why it's been used in so many horror movies and thrillers.

I began as a violinist, not a composer. Thus my contact with orchestral musicians, with the source of music, is very important.

If I were reborn, if I were a teen-ager now, starting my career as a composer, I would do again what I have done.

For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.

Every day I write. I am not waiting for a great idea from heaven.

The communists saw what we did in the arts as the only product of socialism that was known in the West, so they tolerated it.

I think in work like 'Passion According to St Luke,' which I wrote when the Church was being persecuted by the Communist regime, it mattered to me to declare for the cause. I sided with the militant Church and I think my music fulfilled an important socio-political function.

When the Second World War started, I was only five but I still remember... Being a witness... I wanted people to remember what happened in our country and elsewhere.

Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

I started to write religious music at a time when it was absolutely impossible. The first religious work I wrote was the 'Psalms of David,' when I was still a student in 1957... At that time, religious music was really forbidden.

I accept all of the music that I wrote.

All I'm interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.

In my own works I am an obsessionist. Though I write humorous music too, much of it has been obsessed by death and the tragic.