Weeping for the victims of Hiroshima

“Crying for the victims of Hiroshima” is one of the central works of the avant-garde period of the work of K. Penderetsky. The work was written for a chamber orchestra of 52 stringed instruments, but the voices of individual instruments are indistinguishable in the total mass of sounds. In “Cry” there is neither melody, nor harmony, nor polyphony in the usual sense of the word. Voices merge into sonor complexes , clusters. The composer cancels the bar, the duration of the sections of the musical work is indicated in seconds.

Penderetsky invents new methods of playing stringed instruments: musicians play behind the stand, knock on the instrument body with the bow shaft.

To fix the music of the work, the composer uses original graphic techniques ^[2] .

One of Penderetsky’s subsequent works, Polymorphy for 48 stringed instruments, is a musical representation of the encephalograms of people listening to Crying for the Victims of Hiroshima.

In the USSR, the composition was first performed in 1966 .

The recordings of this work were made by Anthony Wit ^[3] , Shimon Cavalla ^[4] , Bruno Maderna ^[5] , Krzysztof Penderecki ^[6] .

The music of “Crying for the Victims of Hiroshima” was included in the soundtrack of films by Stanley Kubrick “The Shining ”, William Fridkin “ The Exorcist ” and Alfonso Cuarona “ Child of Man ”, as well as episodes 8 and 11 of season 3 of the series “ Twin Peaks ”.