Many Many Form

Polymorphia is scored for forty-eight strings: twenty-four violins and eight each of violas, cellos, and basses. The title, a Greek word meaning "multiple shapes or forms," refers to the work's fluctuation between sound and noise, softness and hardness. The structure comprises three parts of equal duration, each lasting about three minutes, with the last segment being a refracted reprise of the first. Once again, the composer prescribes extended and unconventional techniques - strings played with pencils for bows, harsh glissandos, slapping the body of the instrument - to coax new sounds and uncommon effects of noise, color, and texture from conventional string instruments. As in the score to the Threnody, bar lines are dispensed with, and gestures notated by duration in seconds, although the use of aleatoric and random principles has been abandoned. Most radically, in writing the piece, Penderecki played a recording of his Threnody for mental patients at the Krakow Medical Center, and then built the musical line of Polymorphia around the abstract shapes of the encephalographs (i.e., charts of brains waves) that resulted.
 

    A remarkable moment occurs at the end of Polymorphia, when nine minutes of savage noise and tension unexpectedly give way to a shimmering catharsis, with a pure, luminous chord of C major: the building block of classical, common-practice harmony. The same instruments that were just manufacturing such an otherworldly din are now singing out in a luscious, clear, common chord. Penderecki's biographer Wolfram Schwinger puts it eloquently: "He thus stakes out the possibilities that can be demanded of traditional instruments, from beautiful, fully saturated tone, which ironically occurs only at the end, to ugly noise." It was from this final chord that Penderecki set out to compose the work, and the same chord that Jonny Greenwood took as his starting point for the companion piece 48 Responses to Polymorphia (2011), which is scored as an exact duplicate in players and instrumentation as its predecessor, though structured in nine short movements of alternating duration, the shortest barely thirty seconds and the longest just over four minutes.   -  Ronen Givony

 There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.  -  Don DeLillo, White Noise