Quotes from Krzysztof Penderecki

Our house was in the middle of town; behind it was the ghetto, from which Jews were sent to concentration camps.

Traveling, talking to people, and rehearsing, I'm always finding new ideas. If I stay in one place, maybe I won't have so many ideas.

My grandfather taught me trees and the Latin names of trees when I was five or six. His father was a forester, so he knew them all.

I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.

I don't believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can't play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.

After so many years, I don't really think writing has to be absolutely new. No. It has to be good work.

As a young man I couldn't travel, nobody could travel, they wouldn't give us a passport. For many years I was trying to go abroad. And then one day I read in the newspaper about a new competition for composers, and the first prize was a trip to the West. I decided I must get the first prize, so I wrote three pieces in three different styles.

I don't really think my work breaks into periods. In fact, if you listen to my work in all its so-called periods, what you should hear is continuity.

If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.

I'm never satisfied. I don't think about what has come before because I'm trying to find something different than I did before.

When writing music for the 'Kaddish,' I evoked the prayers that were sung in Eastern Galicia, Ukraine and Romania. I was advised by my late friend, Boris Carmeli... He would sing me various melodies that were sung by his grandfather, thus they had to be at least as old as the mid-19th century.

I always felt independent of musical fashion.

Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books, not everybody has to do it. Music is not for everybody.

There is some limit to finding, always, new things. It's rather impossible.

I don't write political music. Political music is immediately obsolete.

I don't like to be alone. I like to have my family around me. They disturb me, of course, but that's OK.

I used to do most of my composing at a little table in a cafe. Composing for 52 instruments, I had to figure out how to accommodate myself to the small table.

Melody was banned from music by the composers of the avant-garde. I was unique among them in always using and writing melody and so I think this is why I've shared my music, why they can have also pleasure, not only an interesting structure.

There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.

The isolation of Eastern Europe actually helped me to be so original. I couldn't travel so much, I had to find my own things, such as making the strings sound like electronic music.

I started studying counterpoint and theory with a physicist whose hobby was music.

There is something about performing my own music, and other people's music, that gives me pleasure. I think I learn more by doing that than I ever did studying music.

I started with very tonal 19th-century music because I wanted to be a violinist as a child. So this was my first music, and then I was very much influenced by Stravinsky and Shostakovich in the 1950s. But I was starting to develop my own style.

I studied violin since I was a boy, and my dream was to be a violinist and to play.