I was In a concert a couple of years ago (in Finland) where they played horror movie music. One of the music was by Krzysztof Penderecki "Polymorphia" from the movie Shining. It was Incredibly creepy but amazing. When it was over everyone gave a standing ovation.
Check out the three horror jazz albums that Kenyon Hopkins put out in the late 50's and early 60's, they will blow you away.... They're very, very rare, took me years to find them.... Got to mention Gustav Holst's The Planets, I've read that when first performed, I think in 1918 the theatre emptied out, people were terrified by it.... Thanks for letting me know about this composer!
I did a research project over horror movie scores and I researched several of Penderecki’s pieces used in The Shining. His work is so brutal yet beautiful. Thank you for this video.
Penderecki is basically the successor to Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg invented serialist/12-tone composition and atonality. Penderecki pushed that style of composition to its limits. Schoenberg composed a piece dedicated to the Jews or Warsaw ghetto that were the first victims of WW2. Penderecki composed one for the victims of the atomic bombing that were the final victims of that war. Both composer's music is eerie and dark and more than a little unhinged. Schoenberg I don't think ever composed for movies, but his influence sure did (see also: Bernard Hermann's score for Psycho). Penderecki, on the other hand, did lend his shit for movies that came in Psycho's wake.
I enjoy Schoenberg. Stravinsky is also a favorite. Avant garde/atonal music has a certain unnameable quality which most popular music doesn’t. I recommend you to check out Scott Walker. His stuff from Climate of Hunter onward is the best imo.
@@viciousdope66 Stravinsky is a different kind of unnerving. There is a primitive and primal quality to his stuff that sounds ancient and eldritch. It's not technically atonal but it has moments where things feel like they're coming apart and everything is chaos that had a similar effect. Schoenberg and Penderecki are unnerving because you can't tell where anything is going. There's no center. There is a structure, which is that the piece is going to run through all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, but as an audience YOU can never tell what passage is coming in what key next. And then you have most pieces being of moderate tempo, with all the instruments playing either nothing but high end or nothing but bottom end and it all ends up sounding like something stalking you in a drunken gait. Or the aural equivalent of severe schizophrenia
For the sake of accuracy and historic order. The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto were the first victims of this war... Were they??? I believe and hope your strange words to be merely an innocent lapse? The Warsaw ghetto was established on October 2, 1940. Even earlier - on February 8 of that year - a ghetto was established in my native Łódź. World War II started in the morning of September 1, 1939; it was started by a bombing raid on Wieluń - a civilian city with no military significance, therefore the only goal and result of the bombings was the massacre of defenseless civilians. At the same time, the Polish seaside military outpost was shelled by a German battleship, which had anchored there, having recently come on a courtesy visit. I have no idea what you meant when you wrote this ridiculous sentence. So I can only repeat that this is either the most common slip of the finger, or some (clumsy, unfortunate) metaphor.
@@marcinkepa6180 That's so polish in a worst sense of the word to get so worked up about history when everyone talks music. The paranoia on display only shows that something's at stake. And Penderecki captures that paranoia too. He always underlined that despite the titles , he never wanted to say anything beyond music.Try to take it to your head.
great video, I always feel smarter at the end of the day when I watch your videos since I learn a lot about musician's lives and what impact they had on pop culture I probably wouldn't have know if it wasn't for your videos
If philosophy and life experiences are accounted for, it's difficult not to consider Allan Pettersson the king of the morose, pretty much everything is universally bleak, and he received very little attention or rewards during his lifetime. The circumstances of Schnittke's 9th symphony's writing also, the manuscript wasn't fully intelligible and required some interpretation. "I think this is music of someone who is already dead - as Schnittke had been, having been pronounced clinically dead on several occasions during his strokes. Much of the music sounds like the exploratory wanderings of a ghost during his first encounter with a new, otherworldly universe.... It is a delicate work, to be sure, and I think there is a lot of richness to keep exploring in its nuances"
Whoa my friend. I've always loved your channel. But you might have outdone yourself. What a fantastically original and truly interesting video along with your usual great research. Thank You !
This man is genius I love his art! This man deserves love and support! I love dark music! Anything dark I love it! May you rest peace you talented man!
I attended one of the last concerts Penderecki conducted himself. This was in the Gdansk Philharmonic. When was it? 2007 or maybe 2009, I don`t remember exactly. He was very fat, couldn`t move much, wasn`t very agile. Looked very old. An alarm went off in the building. Not in the concert hall itself, but you could hear it. He paused the concert until they switched it off. He was very calm and concentrated on music: a great master - you could feel it. This concert was one of those things that happen only once in a lifetime, and at the time I was vaguely aware it wouldn`t happen again.
Penderecki did not compose horror music. People are conditioned to associate dissonant music with horror movies because the great composers have been ripped off for that purpose. I never think of horror when listening to modern composers.
Honestly, listening to Penderecki's work outright is 10x scarier than hearing it in a horror film. Shit, his music is scarier than most horror films in general.
Personally (perhaps being in minority) i like "7 Gates of Jerusalem" the most among his pieces. Maybe because it is the most "normal", yet anusual. It mixes sense of holiness, majesty and horror and thus nicely coresponds with Old Testament quotes singed by choir. Pozdrawiam z Polski!
A core foundation of both of them was utilizing microtones - all the notes and frequencies between the usual westerns diatonic scales. A bit geeky I know, but It really is a huge part of the ‘scary unsettling’ vibe. 😊
When I hear Penderecki referred to as horror's favorite composer, I imagine a group of Italian film maestros like Riz Ortolani and Fabio Frizzi standing along with the members of Goblin and looking absolutely dejected and very sad...
Agreed. I had to do a full analysis of “Contrasts” for as my contemporary composition as part of my undergrad exit exam. As it also included my discipline, clarinet, I had to perform an excerpt myself, as well as perform the examples of the clarinet lines throughout my oral presentation. I had done comparison analysis of other Bartok pieces, and boy. I needed to walk in the sun afterwards quite a few times. It was rough. However, Penderecki, I feel, is dark in a different way. I’ve always said that to fully grasp the depth ad breath of his works, you need to SEE them performed. The frenetic energy often injected into the performance, NEEDED to perform them, is unparalleled. The world is missing him greatly. A giant among men.
I'm surprised you haven't did anything on the band SKYND (if you haven't) I just watched your disturbing rap songs, I've been a fan of BLH from day one but SKYND's videos are more disturbing by far because they are based on actual events.
It took a whole day, but in college one of the pieces that I did for my percussion recital, was a 13 time loop, me playing all the parts, Varese's Ionisation! A difficult but beautiful piece!
Here's a fun fact :D I once went for a walk with my friend to the cementary at midnight, cause it was a kind of very calm and warm night and the peace at cementary is actually very calming, nothing scary. He decided though that he has to scare me with some music examples, and he started to play me some horror metal or something... you know with whispers and stuff. I was like dude, that's pretentious not scary, but he kept on showing me them, so eventually I was like "OK, if You wanna be scared then liesten to this", and I played him "threnody for victims of hiroshima". The poor guy was terrified :D
I literally can not listen to music like this. It honestly will make me paranoid wanting it to be day time and my mom to come sit with me, it really might give me nightmares. Movies or images don’t bother me but Sound fucks me right up.
Thank you for this video - but i have several problems with it and this is not criticism, but a precursor for discussion?? Firstly - a very pedantic point, it's not a 'song'. Secondly, the fact that he titled 'threnody' afterwards suggests he realised it could have a wider political influence. 3- forget Film Music. He never wrote anything intended for film. He once stated that he wanted to write "liberating sound beyond all tradition". He was a great admirer of Chopin (as am I), but he wanted to break free from all traditional harmonic forms. He is NOT the father of horror music, only that directors discovered his sound (and that of Ligeti and Bartok). Penderecki was amazing, but he has very little to do wit horror music other than the fact that direcotrs/producers used his music for their own ends. Please discuss?
that first piece works just fine in a movie or as the soundtrack of a documentary but c'mon it's not music, it's pure irritating noise. it makes sense only if related to something else, not on its own. however kudos to him for saying f*uck you to the church
I LOVE Penderecki, but I'm not sure he would be "the godfather of horror music" considering the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern) came way before him. Also, there were plenty of composers around the same time as Penderecki writing what could be considered "horror music". What about Scelsi, Ligeti or Xenakis for example? Are their contributions completely overshadowed by Penderecki? I think not! Nice video, but let's not conflate Penderecki as a godfather of horror music when it's clear that he wasn't the first composer to attempt in writing this kind of music.
@@Porururidimu let me just quote from my own comment chain here: "mass murdering millions of people to win a war is nothing but a genocide. it's genocide by definition. the only reason to ever war is to protect the civilians, and any other excuse is only measured by the civilian casualties. they were just another force that the civilians had to be protected from. what makes this the worst genocide among the other similarly terrible genocides seen in human history is that to this date this atrocity is taught justified. we are living inside the worst monster that has ever walked on earth." ps. goes very well with the fact that if you cannot imagine a better solution to any situation imaginable than nuking two cities full of innocent people, you are evil to the very core.
1:15 how does the sound of strings grinding induce feeling of fear, dread, loneliness, etc etc ... Melodrama at its peak.. What's so scary with the sounds? These are just sounds, meaning the thing*(natural phenomenon) occurs when air molecules vibrates in a given rhythm. That's it. NATURE* So what's so scary? F the classical Greeks for innovating drama! which is one of the main distorting factors to human rationality and reasoning, alongside the likes of religion, nationalism, etc etc... Disgusting huh? Why don't use the energy you get from your food to use your brains in some productive way, like theorising your own scientific research, peer review others', etc etc.. i even have no problem in entrainment. I mean not everything has to be solely contributive towards mankind you know. You can have a time of relaxation and play. I can receive reasonable extent of drama obviously as a homo sapiens myself. But feeling scares, dread and loneliness for sounds????? oh my mmmm It's same as getting goosebumps upon seeing arrow rain scenes in medieval movies, bullied kid got his revenge on the bully scene, child riding a dragon and screaming "yaaahoo" "yeeeehaa" scene, and so on ... Right? you get goosebumps from them right??! Disgusting! pfft
