Krzysztof Penderecki

I started music late.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

The 1960s were a time of cultural revolution in Poland. And I was a part of that revolution. For me, those years…

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

You can only learn orchestration if you have the possibility of using an orchestra.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

Composers are very individual creatures.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

My family was very open. My grandfather was German and a Protestant. My father, a lawyer, was Greek-Catholic and played the violin.…

— Krzysztof Penderecki

My grandfather taught me trees and the Latin names of trees when I was five or six. His father was a forester,…

— Krzysztof Penderecki

Usually composers need a reason to write. I need a deadline.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

The circumstances In which I grew up In Poland were not auspicious for humor.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

There's a kind of passionate expression in all my pieces. It's just that the nature of the expression takes different forms.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

When Kubrick called me about 'The Shining,' it was very strange. He first asked me to write music for his film, but…

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

Conducting is a natural way to participate in one's own music. Almost every 19th-century composer Mendelssohn, Mahler was conducting or playing his…

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

I love Shostakovich. We were good friends.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

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

— Krzysztof Penderecki

I always had my roots in the past.

— Krzysztof Penderecki