The Awakening of Jacob, an Orchestral Work by Krzysztof Penderecki: Crossing Paths Between Avant-Garde and Neo-Romantic Aesthetics

Description

According to renowned Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020), his orchestral composition The Awakening of Jacob, which premiered in 1974, defines a decisive breaking point in his musical style. However, despite its undeniable artistic and historical relevance, there are no musicological studies that approach this work analytically and, as a result, reveal which technical and stylistic aspects might define the new creative path that began in Penderecki's music back then. The current study intends to address these questions by exposing some of the idiosyncrasies of the aforementioned work from an analytical angle while focusing on dominant musical aspects of Penderecki's artistic production from the 1960s and 1970s, namely the specific use of textural elements, sound masses, harmonic/vertical structures, and use of drones/pedal points.
Following a brief historical context, The Awakening of Jacob will be presented through a comparative analytical study with works from the preceding period, such as Anaklasis (1960), Polymorphia (1961), Fluorescences (1962), De Natura Sonoris 1 and 2 (1966, 1971), and the 1st Symphony (1973), allowing several of the affiliations with The Awakening Of Jacob to emerge.
The main purpose of this paper and its expressive contribution to the field of Penderecki’s studies is to present a genealogy of this composition, revealing which specific aspects are inherited from Penderecki's creative past—from the so-called sonoristic period - and how it contains the seeds of what would become known as his neo-romantic phase.

Period	29 May 2023
Held at	The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) - The 14th Asian Conference on Arts & Humanities, Japan
Degree of Recognition	International