Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
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Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (Tren ofiarom Hiroszimy in Polish) is a musical composition for 52 string instruments, composed in 1959 by Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), which took third prize at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Composers' Competition in Katowice in 1960. The piece swiftly attracted interest around the world and made its young composer famous.
The piece—originally called 8'37" (at times also 8'26")—applies the sonoristic technique and rigors of specific counterpoint to an ensemble of strings treated unconventionally in terms of tone production. "While reading the score," Tadeusz Zielinski wrote in 1961, "one may admire Penderecki's inventiveness and coloristic ingeniousness. Yet one cannot rightly evaluate the Threnody until it has been listened to, for only then does one face the amazing fact: all these effects have turned out to serve as a pretext to conceive a profound and dramatic work of art!" The piece tends to leave an impression both solemn and catastrophic, earning its classification as a threnody. On October 12, 1964, Penderecki wrote, "Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost."
The piece's unorthodox, largely symbol-based score directs the musicians to play at various vague points in their range or to concentrate on certain textural effects. Penderecki sought to heighten the effects of traditional chromaticism by using "hypertonality"—composing in quarter tones—to make dissonance more prominent than it would be in traditional tonality. Another unusual aspect of Threnody is Penderecki's expressive use of total serialism. The piece creates an "invisible canon," an overall musical texture that is more important than the individual notes, making it a leading example of sound mass composition. As a whole, Threnody constitutes one of the most extensive elaborations on the tone cluster.
The Welsh rock group Manic Street Preachers sampled a portion of Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for the introduction to their 1991 single "You Love Us."
