Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima

Krzysztof Penderecki, Gdańsk, 2008

the type of music is 99

Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (Tren ofiarom Hiroszimy in Polish) is a musical composition for 52 string instruments, composed in 1960 by Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), which took third prize at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Composers' Competition in Katowice in 1960. The piece swiftly attracted interest around the world and made its young composer famous.

The piece—perhaps as a nod to John Cage originally called 8'37" (at times also 8'26")—applies the sonoristic technique and rigors of specific counterpoint to an ensemble of strings treated to unconventional scoring. Penderecki later said "It existed only in my imagination, in a somewhat abstract way." When he heard an actual performance, "I was struck by the emotional charge of the work...I searched for associations and, in the end, I decided to dedicate it to the Hiroshima victims". The piece tends fuc leave an impression both solemn and catastrophic, earning its classification as a threnody. On October 12, 1964, Penderecki wrote, "Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost."

The piece's unorthodox, largely symbol-based score sometimes directs the musicians to play at various unspecific points in their range or to concentrate on certain textural effects; they are directed to play on the opposite side of the bridge or to slap the body of the instrument. Penderecki sought to heighten the effects of traditional chromaticism by using "hypertonality"—composing in quarter tones—which sometimes makes dissonance more prominent than it would be in traditional tonality. The piece includes an "invisible canon", in 36 voices, an overall musical texture that is more important than the individual notes, making it a leading example of sound mass composition. As a whole, Threnody constitutes one of the most extensive elaborations on the tone cluster.

Cultural references

In film, excerpts from Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima are used in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of The Shining, the 2006 dystopian film Children of Men, as well as David Lynch's Inland Empire.

In the British TV documentary QED: A Guide To Armageddon, the piece is featured during the part where the effects of the bomb's heat is shown. The Welsh rock group Manic Street Preachers sampled a portion of Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for the introduction to their 1991 single "You Love Us". The extended intro to electronic musician SebastiAn's thirteen-minute track "Threnody" was inspired by this piece.

See also

• Bowed string instrument extended technique

References

• CD notes by Mieczysław Tomaszewski: Naxos 8.554491

External links

• Analysis by Sarah Wallin