Sam Kaseta 12.21.

18
Meter (or lack thereof) in the early music of Penderecki

The music of Krzysztof Penderecki has been lifted from the concert hall into
popular culture thanks to, among other things, the use of ​Threnody to the Victims of
Hiroshima ​in Stanley Kubrick’s ​The Shining.​ In a sense, Penderecki’s early works are
well-suited for music editors to incorporate in film, because his music is structured in
such a way that timbral colors often sustain without variation and can therefore be
lengthened or shortened as needed per the dictates of the film. If these colors can be
lengthened and shortened without significantly changing the identity of the piece, then
what are the rules governing time and duration in Penderecki’s early works?
After graduating from the Academy of Music in Krakow, in the late 1950’s and
early 1960’s Penderecki sought to write music that abandoned established musical
structures, including melody and harmony. Analysts agree that “Penderecki frees
himself not only from such elements as melodics, harmonics, and rhythmics. His point
of departure is a new concept of sound… which occupies a different place in time and
vertical space” (Kaluzny, 94). Indeed, Penderecki reportedly stated, “All I'm interested in
is liberating sound beyond all tradition.” In what sense does this liberation include
elements of rhythm and meter?
His music is often referred to as “sonoristic” because Penderecki was at that time
focused not on traditional structural elements like melody and counterpoint, but rather
on the timbral elements of sound itself. With his colleague, acoustician Mieczyslaw
Drobner, the young composer devised a system of composition based on timbre and
timbral combinations that organized the orchestra into material categories, such as
metal, wood, and leather or skin (Mirka ARTICLE, 436-7). Penderecki used this system
to compose several works, including ​Threnody ​(see timbral outline below), ​Polymorphia​,
Canon,​ and ​String Quartet No. 1​, which fall into the same stylistic family. Melody and
rhythm are not present in any traditional sense, but nevertheless music must
necessarily comprise some frequency or frequencies sounding in time. Therefore we
must ask, how did he choose the frequencies and durations?
 While Penderecki is very particular about the extended techniques he specifies,
he is not always strict about pitch and duration. The particular pitches and rhythms that
he ​does​ notate in these pieces, however, were composed with the precise formalism of
serialization techniques, which “would become a central aspect of his composition
process for the next decade” (Cotto, 8). While he does in these works “use staff
notation, it is provided only as a framework, not an exact representation of the
performance requirements. This staff notation is unmeasured through-out, and recital
numbers are given in terms of time in minutes and seconds” (Cotto, 9). Is this music
metered​ in any way? If there are notational “beats”, they are unmeasured. If we say one
second equals one beat, does that make sense in the given musical context?
Penderecki’s notational system further obscures any traditional traces of meter,
because it is based on principles of graphic proportion. As Jan Kaluzny writes,
“Penderecki’s notational system is based on the rules of diagram and graphic concepts.
It is shown primarily in tempo notation. The bar division is replaced entirely by the time
division. Each page of the score is divided according to a diagram into time sectors
determining in seconds the start, duration and the end of a given fragment” (87). It is
important to note that many of Penderecki’s pieces are of approximate duration, as the
composer emphasizes that it is the ​proportion​ of sections to one another that is
important to him. Mirka cites Penderecki’s comments on his compositional process as
stating: “At the initial stage of writing a piece, when I have not yet found the language
with which I will operate, I ponder the schema - the architecture - to such an extent that
actually I ​draw​ the piece. I put it together from graphical elements which are for me
provable in music… The graphic logic proves true in musical logic. It constitutes a kind
of abbreviation which allows me to ‘see’ the piece” (qtd in Mirka, 20).
An integral part of Penderecki’s poietic process, then, is transforming spatial
boundaries into temporal ones. Thus Penderecki’s music reverses traditional notions of
time-span-reduction and, at least on a surface level, totally disregards notions of meter.
If, indeed, some of Penderecki’s music has no traditional notions of rhythm or
meter, then how do the players synchronize their performances? In some cases, a small
ensemble practices the materials together, and in larger ensembles, a conductor is
required. In this paper, we will focus on how musicians navigate the latter scenario,
which is especially interesting in Penderecki’s case because he is himself a conductor.
Penderecki’s methods of conducting his own work can give us a unique insight into how
he conceives his music, specifically with respect to rhythm and time. What does the
conductor indicate, if not beats?
When Penderecki conducts his early work, his primary task appears to be the
cueing of entrances. In a video recording of Penderecki conducting ​Polymorphia​ with
the Aukso chamber group in Poland in 2011, the majority of his gestures correspond to
timed indications of change. These moments of change mostly happen at what could
(very loosely) be called bar lines in the score. It would be perhaps more accurate to call
these bar lines “time-group onset points”. These points are not indicated very precisely
by Penderecki as a conductor, whose cues are often very drawn-out and inexact.
Between entrances, he often continues moving his hands in a somewhat
ambiguous way, perhaps indicating to the orchestra that they should continue, often
indicating dynamics with his left hand. At time-group number 8, he gives a fairly strong
cue to the double basses, who begin to gliss almost inaudibly, and does likewise for the
cellos at number 9 (see score excerpt below). When he cues the first violins in at
time-group 10, however, he does so with a diminutive gesture that must be quickly
supplemented with a “come-up” indication that they should play more strongly.

At 11, where one might expect him to begin beating or indicating seconds, as he
does in the score (see excerpt below), Penderecki continues mostly only cueing large
entrances, for instance the entrance of the remaining violins at 15. This is an indication
to the analyst that the composer most likely does ​not​ begin thinking of musical time on a
grid at time-group 11 even though he has written it that way. Penderecki seems to
merely have gotten more specific about the coordination of what he nevertheless
conceived of as mass amalgamations of sound. However, at 16, he begins moving his
arms more regularly in time but seemingly without a conducting pattern, except for the
consistent downward pointing motion of time-group onset points.
 Penderecki gives the orchestra an apparent tearing-off motion at 22, after which
he makes more of his beat-like “continuing” motions before cueing the violins col legno
battuto two seconds after time-group marking 24 (see score excerpt below). Around this
point he stops his “continue” indications and turns to the violins to physically personify
the musical character he wants them to embody - namely, one that is heavier and more
aggressive. He then proceeds to transition several times from his typical ambiguous
motion to personifying a musical characteristic and back, even shaking his body at
time-group 27 to convey that he wants a more weighty, separated pizzicato.
 Like any good conductor, Penderecki often makes sure he has an instrumental
section’s attention before cueing the “downbeat”. Specifically, at 32, Penderecki focuses
on carefully cueing section entrances (see score excerpt below), and then around 34
once again focuses on embodying the character of the section, before giving a strong
coordinated onset-point cue at 38. The beginning of time-group 38 is when pitched
sound drops out of the texture, and the style of Penderecki’s cue indicates that he wants
this to be a sharp transition.
 Again at time-group 44, Penderecki prepares and coordinates the entrances
sharply (see score excerpt below), and then spends the rest of that time-group and the
following indicating the character of the music (see image below). However, even while
he is doing that, he keeps pulsing his hands vaguely in a sort of “continue” motion. The
video of this performance then ends at time-group 46.
 Because Penderecki’s “continue” indications change rate (or tempo!) depending
on the section of the piece, I would argue that these indications represent a
subconscious metrical division. The act of conducting requires one to move one’s body
in time to the music in a way that the act of ​composing​ does not, so it is perhaps
possible that Penderecki does not consider these divisions to be part of the piece. They
are nevertheless present in his conducting, because he chooses to keep moving
between delivering the cues that are his primary function.
Another example of Penderecki’s conducting of his work from this period, ​Canon
(also recorded in Warsaw in 2011), shows much the same technique in practice:
occasional and unpatterned apparent time-beating, with strong cues and lots of
character movement. While a video of Penderecki conducting ​Threnody​ is not available,
it is interesting to note that other conductors use a similar, but subtly different,
technique.
Another Polish conductor, ​Krzysztof Urbanski, also gives clear, strong cues at
the appropriate entrances - for instance, in the very first time-group of ​Threnody​ - but he
makes fewer unnecessary gestures and his “continue” motions are less easily confused
with his cues. Urbanski’s indication to continue, rather, is a horizontal motion with some
undulation, as if he is drawing a line through the air similar to Penderecki’s own vibrato
signs. Like Penderecki’s “continue” motions, these undulations of Urbanski’s hands
could betray a subconscious subdivision.
Urbanski’s debatable subdivision is at most an interpretation; but are
Penderecki’s vague gestures an indication of compositional (sub)metrical structure? If
so, it is not part of his proclaimed compositional process of that period, which purported
to eschew musical tradition. Supposedly this included all traditional notions of melody,
harmony, and rhythm - but I argue that it is possible that an ​implicit​ un-notated meter
exists in Penderecki’s early works that is physically manifested by the composer as
conductor.

Works Cited:

Polymorphia: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwImX18AS_E

Canon: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSBVXGgRXWk

Threnody: ​https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu371CDZ0ws

Cotto, Anthony. “String Quartets of Penderecki: Analyzing Form, Harmony, and a Return to
Tradition”. ​Undergraduate Research Journal​, Indiana University South Bend, 2011.
Kaulzny, Jan. “Krzysztof Penderecki and His Contribution to Modern Musical Notation.”
The Polish Review​, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1963.

Kozak, Mariusz. “Experiencing Structure in Penderecki’s ​Threnody:​ Analysis,

Ear-Training, and Musical Understanding.”​ Music Theory Spectrum,​ Vol. 38, 2017.

Mirka, Danuta. ​The Sonoristic Structuralism of Krzysztof Penderecki.​ Olkusz, 1997.

Mirka, Danuta. “To Cut the Gordian Knot: The Timbre System of Krzysztof Penderecki”.
​ ol. 45, No. 2, 2001.
Journal of Music Theory, V