Music to Trance By

College of Music, Mahidol University. Nakhonpathom, Thailand. March 24, 2011. Before deciding to spend an afternoon attending a symphony program labeled “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” I downloaded the major work on the program, Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, to give it a trial run. Inasmuch as I very much enjoy going out to Mahidol’s Salaya campus, I was inclined to attend, but only if I could tolerate Gorecki’s music, an entire non-stop hour of it. (Photo left: Polish conductor Dariusz Mikulski also played the French horn in Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 3, during the first half of the concert.)

Much to my surprise, I enjoyed listening to Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3. Gorecki, who died in 2010 at age 77, was a Polish composer belonging, according to musicologist Alex Ross, to a school of modern music which became known as “sonorism,” which itself was a part of “texture music,” or, according to the TPO’s program notes, a school known in Europe as “New Simplicity,” or in the US, as “Minimalist.” Regardless of the taxonomy, the Gorecki 3rd produces a beautiful orchestral sound, which in its repetitions and level decibles, is mesmerizing. The soprano solo part, which occupies a part of each of the three movements, is both sorrowful and haunting. It is not too much to proffer that Gorecki’s “sonorism” is trance-inducing, and the absolute stillness of the audience, not a usual occurrence in Thailand, may be some evidence of profound absorption in the music. Polish soprano Iwona Handzlik (above) sang three songs by Gorecki before performing as soloist in Symphony No. 3