A Recipe for Strophe

Combine the wailing of a soprano, a haunting male voice, clashing keyboard harmonies, intense sul ponticello passages, the eerie hum of woodwinds with a dash of unnerving squeaks, and you have Krzysztof Penderecki’s Strophen. The award-winning piece—with ancient texts from Stobeus and Sophocles—is sporadic, experimental and wonderfully disturbing.

A precursor to the composer’s later and more complex works, Strophen could be the first stanza to an ode that celebrates the insane and the creepy. As I listen to the chilling and powerful mixture of sounds, I contemplate the themes, which explore the beauty of man pitted against suffering, evil, deceit and death. I am kept on edge by the unconventional tones and the unpredictable direction of the music. And all the while, I wonder whether my emotions are able to make sense of what I am hearing. Perhaps these unsettling harmonies would have been well suited for the opening ode of a Greek tragedy. But then, what would Penderecki’s antistrophe and epode sound like?

In acclaimed films such as The Shining and The Exorcist, the composer’s works have elevated the cinematic experience of horror to a deranged level. For me, nothing could be more disturbing than ‘the bat scene’ where Jack Torrance’s unhinged behaviour is made more obvious by the continuous high-pitched clatter in the background that sends shivers up my spine. Oscar-winning directors Peter Weir, David Lynch and Martin Scorsese would also make Penderecki the go-to composer for nightmare-inducing soundtracks.

His later works brought him a string of Grammys and celebrity status, but it is Strophen that first introduced the composer to the world. This short, but groundbreaking piece would be the beginning of Penderecki’s journey into a new and radical sound. It would determine those special ingredients—tone-production techniques that are honed and amplified—for his major large-scale compositions. It would also exemplify the genius of his music: the power to communicate emotions, attitudes and a deeper understanding of the natural world.