His striving for harmony and order, and his attachment to the large musical forms, particularly the symphonic form, puts Panufnik among the classics of twentieth-century music. His work grew out of the classical models - not surprisingly, since neoclassicim was the dominant musical trend, particularly in Poland, during Panufnik’s musically formative years. An attachment to classical, traditional forms and genres remained a living force in his music until and including his last works, but he filled them with his own, new content.
Andrzej Panufnik created his own musical world – modern, but not avant-garde. On the basis of traditional musical values he created works that were rich and varied, surprising in their abundance of shades and colours. The core of his output is symphonic. Ten symphonies, a number of instrumental concertos, overtures and many orchestral works – all of them reveal the symphonic nature of their creator. Even as early as 1945, after the first performance of Panufnik’s later withdrew Symphony No. 1, Zygmunt Mycielski observed that the young composer was a typical symphonist and that the main feature of his music was the struggle between emotion and restraint. Both these descriptions remain valid to this day, and apply to the full, closed legacy of Andrzej Panufnik, which also includes the equally important chamber works.
In the musical culture of twentieth-century Poland, Panufnik’s music occupies an important place. What is also significant is that it is imbued throughout with the spirit of Poland. In its dedications, quotations, atmosphere and mood, it testifies most tellingly to the roots of its author. Andrzej Panufnik succeeded in creating his own variety of national style, continuing along the path established by the works of Chopin and Szymanowski. There is no doubt that, in spite of having left Poland, he always remained a Polish composer, and his music forms a significant part of Poland’s national heritage.
Panufnik’s harmonic language was equally strictly disciplined. The kinds of chords he used would most often result from the possibilities of transformation offered by the interval cell lying at the base of the work. He would consciously limit his harmonic language, avoiding dense, complicated sound structures. Panufnik’s harmonies are neither tonal – in spite of some references to the major-minor system, such as the use of tonal centres, especially in his early works, or chords of a double, major-minor character, with both major and minor third simultaneously – nor are they avant-garde. The composer was far from employing serialism, although some elements of his creative method resemble the techniques used in dodecaphony. He did not overload his compositions with an exaggerated degree of dissonance; one must search in vain for sound clusters in his scores, he also rarely used quartertones. The harmonic language devised by Panufnik, in which symmetry also plays quite a significant part, is characterised by originality and, working together with the other elements of the composition, imparts to his music its specific climate and character.
A significant feature of Panufnik’s approach to composition was the uncommon degree of discipline in the shaping of the structure of his consecutive works. This discipline can be discerned already in his early compositions, in the careful and precise planning of their structure, from single motifs and chords, through the development of the melodic and harmonic layers, to the form of the whole. Or rather, the procedure was applied in reverse, since Panufnik composed by starting with a general concept, and gradually turning his attention to the smallest detail.
That early stage in the creation of a new work is for me the hardest. Everything has to be imagined and worked out in my head before a single note is put on to paper.
Thus, he would think through the shape of the future composition, its architectural framework, which he would then consistently fill with sounds and feelings. At the same time he admitted that the emotional content, the spiritual message and the atmosphere of a work were of great significance for him. He needed first to feel an impulse, an inspiration which would indicate the general climate of the composition and channel his thinking in the appropriate direction. Only then would he take the next step of planning the structure of the work. The aim of the structure, always built up with great precision and discipline, was to facilitate the free flow of emotions, not restraining them but also not allowing them to dominate. For this reason the transparency of musical language was equally important to him – in the area of harmony, texture and form. This purpose was served by dividing the timbral layer of his works, especially orchestral ones, into a number of harmonic-melodic planes (usually three), each with a slightly different instrumental setting. At the same time he used the full sound of a symphony orchestra really only at climactic moments of the composition, transferring the leadership of the musical action to selected groups of instruments, sometimes solo ones, in other fragments. This enabled him to avoid dense texture and superimposing layers of melodic convolutions, which might dim the structural and emotional picture of the composition.
For myself, I continue my quest for clarity and transparency in my scores. I never was tempted by the trend to construct music of such density and intellectual complexity that even the finest musical ear cannot discern inaccuracies in performance. And just as I bypassed the now eclipsed fashion for dodecaphony, I also felt no urge to leap on the bandwagon of aleatoric music: the element of chance is contrary to my passion for order, which in my eyes is the intrinsic core of a viable work of art. For me, economy of means and my responsibility over each and every note I put on paper is crucial.
Camilla Panufnik
The element which ensured structural unity in Panufnik's works was symmetry and, more widely – geometry. All of his compositions contain a series of symmetrical patterns and references, equally in the area of form, harmony and melodic lines. Moreover, beginning in the 1970s, the composer represented the form of his works visually as geometric diagrams; most often, these would be created prior to the actual sound material, at the pre-compositional stage. It was at this point that he found geometry particularly helpful - the diagram, inspired by the shapes of geometric figures, would provide a structural framework which would help the composer to order 'his music, his thoughts and his feelings'.
Panufnik’s passion for symmetry corresponded to a pronounced tendency towards limiting the musical material. At the base of the majority of his compositions lies one - sometimes two - selected interval cell, which constitutes the point of departure for all the harmonic and melodic procedures. In the course of the composition the cell undergoes a variety of transformations – transpositons and reflections, i.e., procedures resulting precisely from the principles of symmetry. Even though musical language built on the three-note interval cell (E-F-B) became the structural basis of Panufnik’s compositions after 1968, elements of cellular thinking and tendencies towards limiting musical material can already be discerned in his early works, such as the Tragic Overture with its four-note 'fear' motif. On the other hand, the early 1980s saw a certain loosening of the rigid rules – beginning with Sinfonia Votiva, the musical material bound within the sound cell connects with lines shaped quasi-tonally, which is reflected in the enriched timbral layer of these works.
Panufnik’s music seems to be characterised by maturity even in his earliest works. Although we are not familiar with his pre-war compositions (with the exception of Piano Trio reconstructed after the war), descriptions of Symphonic Variations, his diploma piece performed at the concert of graduates of Warsaw Music Conservatory in 1936, indicate that some of the features which characterised his symphonic output were apparent even in his first substantial orchestral work. Reviewers noted Panufnik’s excellent control of the orchestra, interesting instrumentation, his tendency to take a soloistic approach to particular instruments and groups of instruments, and the significant part played by percussion – precisely those features which are also present in nearly all his later orchestral works.
Panufnik’s earliest surviving works: Tragic Overture, Five Polish Peasant Songs, Lullaby and Sinfonia Rustica are already characterised by strong individuality, apparent above all in original harmonics, interesting transformation of folk material and inventive instrumentation, which reveals previously unknown timbral aspects of strings (Lullaby) or woodwind instruments (Five Songs). The composer’s musical language evolved over the years, but in that development one would look in vain for radical turns, indicating a rejection of earlier values. Panufnik remained true to his convictions and to his own conception of music. Harmony and order, attachment to transparent construction, striving for harmony and balance between the formal elements and emotional content, with symmetry permeating the whole – these are the common features of all his compositions.
During the avant-garde years, with their experimental approach to all aspects of a musical composition, and their rejection of the traditional structural and timbral norms, Panufnik was writing works as subtle in their beauty as Landscape or Autumn Music; he did not even try to escape emotionality, which was being condemned at the time, and in Sinfonia Sacra he almost raised it to the dimension of pathos. The spiritual, or emotional, as well as religious elements, returned to the arena of world music around the mid-1970s. However, they had been present in Panufnik’s earlier works; interestingly, it was just then, in the second half of the 1970s, in works such as Sinfonia di Sfere, Sinfonia Mistica, Metasinfonia that these elements gave way to geometric abstraction, only to make their triumphant return at the beginning of the next decade (Sinfonia Votiva).
