Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil is a composer who describes nature through music and is inspired by travelling: to Iceland, rainforests, Japan…
I meet Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil in her home in Oporów in Wrocław. It’s a rainy day. That is the only reason we don’t talk in the garden—her pride and refuge. But, together with her husband Wiktor, she shows me around the garden through the window: there are flowers; there is an arbor. The walnut tree in the middle is unhealthy, but you can sit in its shadow when it’s hot. There are many fruit trees: cherries, plums, apples. There is a pine and a thuja in the front.
Jan Pelczar: What does a forest sound like in a composer’s ears?
Grażyna Pstrokońska-Nawratil: It rustles, it creaks, it makes noise. Trees rip. When you focus you can hear the coursing of water, for example in birch trees. A forest has levels: undergrowth, thicket, small trees, canopy. Older and older, broadleaf or coniferous. We have a piece of land in Przemiłów, on a hillside. An aspen tree grows there. Its leaves emit a sound that is like a percussion effect.
Trees sound different?
Just look at an oak leaf, a maple leaf and a pine sprig. All are different—the form, the structure. When you add dynamic movement, wind, each will sound different. Leaves also sound different when they are green and when they are dried-out, in autumn. You just need to listen.
Which ones have the most appeal?
I love birch trees, they give me strength. I like hugging them. They have just cut my beloved birches in Wrocław at the hill called Górka Miłości. They were drying out. It hurts.
Cutting can also inspire.
I was fascinated by tropical forests. In one of the films about the Amazon rainforest, I saw a drastic scene. A 400-year-old tree, jutting out of the forest like some mammoth, dies within several minutes—killed by a chainsaw. In its agony it falls down, moves back up, bumps against lower trees. The way it sounded, I immediately knew I had to write it down and create a musical monument to this tree. That’s how Rainforests for flute and orchestra was created.
How many centuries did it take for composers to learn to imitate what is intrinsic to nature?
It was always there, but we had different means of expression. Just listen to a Gregorian chant. Even if it is monophonic, it is enough to walk around the aisles of a church and the architecture will make it all layer up and loop; we begin to hear the great harmony of this music. Arvo Pärt used it perfectly in his music.
The phenomenon of the so-called golden ratio often appears in music, directly drawn from nature. Antonio Stradivari used it while building his violins; Bach and Bartók used it in composing. What is the golden ratio in music?
The eternal golden proportion. The rule is the same as in visual arts or architecture, but it is applied to a timeline. It can also be calculated based on the number of bars, if they are of the same length. The whole composition gets divided into two parts in such a way that the ratio of the longer part to the shorter part is the same as the ratio of the whole piece to the larger part. Sectio aurea is inscribed into human nature, which is why it is so powerful. Where the golden cut (φ =1.618) falls in the piece is usually where the emotional climax of the piece is built up in compositions by the great masters, for example in Witold Lutosławski’s Musique funèbre or in Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. There is no indication that Bartók calculated anything. He never wrote or said anything about it, his music simply has it. Supposedly, while composing, he liked to have a leaf lying by him, or a sunflower or a conifer. He looked at them and that gave him inspiration. And the golden ratio is visible in the structure of many of his compositions. The transfer of principles ruling nature to music was absolutely subconscious. Bartók is one of my favorite composers, just like Claude Debussy and the earlier Alexander Scriabin. The great masters. Thanks to them, something exceptional happened in music—due to getting into harmony with nature. There are certain truths about our world, certain rules, that never change. You could say that a human being is formed, in a Biblical sense, based on the greatest god; that he/she contains symmetry, proportion, the golden rule—just like in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. Sunflowers and fir sprigs also contain fractals, which can be found in music…
Nature in musical score looks like an equation?
Not exactly. Musical score is a convention, even though to some extent it does approximate the energetic flow of the piece of music. Pictures of nature captured in painting and literature can also be conveyed by music. For me, music is telling a story and painting with sound, with architecture in the background. The starting point are emotions. The emotional wave takes on a musical form in particular colors, which depend on me composing for an orchestra or for a smaller ensemble. I have my own color code. That’s how space is born, filled with sounds, as well as musical time. All of this together creates the form and the structure of a whole piece.
What form does it take?
I like drawing. I sketch the course of the whole piece and its energetic nature. Then I add various colors, clouds with structural solutions. It is not a diagram, more mountains and valleys of varied contours that are to reflect the character of the composition. In the past, they used to be precise designs on graph paper. Now I work more freely and they are just indications of emotional trails, but a drawing of this kind very effectively measures the form and doesn’t let me get lost. You spend most of the time working on the structure, because you have to imagine how to record, for example, a blue hum. Sometimes you spend a lot of time thinking about it, so it doesn’t end up being banal.
In the moment of inspiration do you know already what kind of piece will be created?
It’s like with writing a novel. You know what it will be about, how the plot will unravel, but you can’t predict whether a character will press a door handle in one scene or ring a doorbell; whether a candle will go out… These are details that emerge in the course of the work. There are different situations: the color and emotion can suddenly change under the pressure of events. Life is life, it flows independently and shapes also our creative thinking. It is informed by beautiful memories and by dramatic incidents, which perhaps didn’t affect us directly, but we witnessed them. Perhaps that is where my idea of cycles comes from. It started with seven frescoes inspired by Giotto and his humanism, subtitled: Man and Life; Man and Death, Man and Dreams; Man and Longing; Man and Faith; Man and Light. The biggest one is Uru Anna for soloist, large choir and large orchestra. Two hundred performers, a mass of sounds. A piece of music from the Earth to the Universe. On the other hand, madrigals are more intimate and mischievous. No text. Just titles, which move the imagination of the audience: In Search of a Wandering Echo, Birds on the Twilight Horizons, An Algorithm of the Dream of a Great City, In the Sun’s Zenith. The composition El Condor for two marimbas and string orchestra, as well as Like the Sun and the Sea for flute and string orchestra, initiated the cycle Thinking of Vivaldi. Eco music is an important cycle for me. It’s not just Rainforest, but also Le soleil, Assisi, many impressions from the Tatra Mountains and the Baltic coast.
Was the idea to create musical reports from trips born in a particular place?
In Israel, in the Holy Land. We came to Nazareth on Palm Sunday. We were greeted with absolute silence. We got off the coach in front of the basilica. Nothing was happening. People scattered, busy taking photos. And suddenly a huge crowd tumbled from behind the basilica, like a stream of lava. We jumped sideways. They were all screaming, singing, playing bagpipes, drums, some horns. They were waving huge palm leaves above their heads. We escaped into the basilica. The doors to the church were closed and it fell silent again. You could only hear the distant sounds of the crowd, filtering through the doors and walls. And then something metaphysical took place: there was a tiny window at the top, allowing a shaft of light in, which went all the way down, dust particles swirling in it disturbed by slamming of the doors. This shaft of light lead to the place at the bottom where there was a tiny threshold, an inconspicuous small door. An incredible moment, because all of a sudden, unexpectedly, the onlooker realized that this was the place of the Annunciation. And at the same moment I heard music. That was how Palm Sunday in Nazareth was conceived. I called this piece a reportage and decided to compose more. I didn’t plan it beforehand, it just happened. In the end, why not? So far, four more have been created: Sand figures from Egypt, ICE-LAND from Iceland, Ring of Tara from Ireland, and AoTeaRoa from New Zealand.
Do you travel regularly?
For many reasons, I ration it. We could afford to go to Egypt, Israel and Iceland only when we had grandchildren. I went to New Zealand, Australia and Japan with my friend because these are serious trips—also in the financial sense—and my music has to first rake in enough. I still have several dreams to fulfil, including the Grand Canyon in Colorado. I have no idea whether I will manage it. But that’s where I would like to go with my husband, to see this amazing place together. It has been my dream since I was young. My Witek says that you reach your dreams slowly…
Isn’t the Canyon more associated with silence?
It is associated with ‘musical’ silence, something amazing. Silence is an absolute necessity to a composer, so that he/she can hear his/her own music. Just like a painter needs to have a canvas, a composer needs to have silence. There are different kinds of silence. There is an active silence, a passive one; there is also a dynamic silence. In my third Fresco, Icarus, I lead to the moment when the disaster strikes. I build maximum tension through everything that one can draw out of an orchestra. This accumulation freezes for a few seconds and only then tumbles down, irrevocably. Without this moment of suspension, it wouldn’t work. It’s just it’s such a silence, it’s simply…
Dense?
Yes. Even though I know the piece, every time I am moved by this moment of maximum tension and silence, in which everything still resounds, but nothing happens anymore. It is just waiting that persists. Like with a human being when he/she reaches the maximum height and knows that in a moment he/she will fall. But still hangs on. Music needs silence very much. Human beings generally need silence.
For what?
For meditation. Composing is thinking. Thinking in sounds, of course.
You learned this way of thinking when studying with Olivier Messiaen.
This kind of meeting can never be forgotten. It was a contact with an exceptional personality, a total artist, a genius. As a young man, Messiaen created a treatise about his own musical language, and he remained faithful to it throughout his journey. He was almost 80-years-old when he was completing his life’s work, an opera about St. Francis of Assisi. That was why he retired. This piece is in eight volumes—the whole spectacle with a break lasts six hours. We were incredibly lucky to see this opera in Salzburg. You didn’t feel those six hours. The music is such that you just listen, not realizing the passage of time. You just need to enter into its peculiar dimension. Some are sceptical about Messiaen’s work and philosophy, but I am not one of them. It’s great music from a great master, very colourful and so logically designed—on top of that, entirely contemporary—that it makes you enter a completely new realm. You can’t compare it with anything else, you can’t imitate it. What you can do is look for the musical truth there and study the unique craftsmanship of the composer. This is what Messiaen imparted on us: to be yourself, to create your own music, to look for new solutions while concurrently building on the works of masters, to transgress the boundaries of imagination. At first, I had problems with it. As a student from 1970s’ Poland, I thought that I had to do something. Sonorism ruled then and if I wanted to have something to say, I had to compose according to its rules. There was some truth in it, because with such music I would make a name for myself, but my musical language softened after a while. The first piece I wrote after coming back from Paris was Icarus—very meticulous, precise, the most ‘clockwork’ of all my compositions. Later on, I relaxed this discipline a bit. I feel better with it, but I still use my own composing technique, which, while still in Paris, I named ‘structure shifting’ (décalage de structures).
Is time, by some called the presentness of the sound, important here?
It’s the essence of music, which can’t be stopped, sped up, slowed down. There are pieces that bore you, make you fidget, look at your watch. It lasted only eight minutes, but it felt like at least twenty. And then there are others that last half an hour, but it feels like several minutes. The biggest art is to not lose time in the piece of music. Music has its own rules, parameters, sounds, rhythms. All imperfections in this area can be fixed, but lost time cannot be brought back. If you allow the listener out of the circle of emotional tension, it is difficult to remedy it later. You need to create a common world with the listener from the first moment of the piece.
So there must be a connection between a composer and a listener?
Music, like literature, must make sense, must have its own peculiar rhetoric. Even when it is about nothing, it’s only such on the surface. Something must happen, something must occur, it must be heading somewhere. In music, time is magic. When somebody is fascinated by a film, a novel, they can’t turn the film off, put the book down, because they have to stay with it until the end. That’s how it should be with music too—the listener should feel that he/she is in the midst of it, he/she is not just an observer. The biggest tribute to a composer is an engrossed silence after the musical performance.
Messiaen also directed his students towards nature.
On the Master’s business card it said he was a composer, philosopher, pianist, theologian and ornithologist. He could recognize birds’ singing. He could immediately tell apart several dozen species, and the same number after a moment’s reflection.
Did he sketch birds’ voices?
He travelled a lot, also to exotic countries. He saw a lot of the world, admired it, watched and listened to it intently. He spent time on his own with nature, recording its sounds. He would leave with a notebook at four in the morning. No recording; he noted birdsong by ear. Then he transcribed this singing in his music into the voices of instruments. I don’t know a Messiaen piece without some birdsong. The Master cannot be imitated, so I have picked something else from the birds’ world: the study of flight, rustling, fluttering. Soaring and descending is the essence of Icarus. On the other hand, in El Condor we hear the title bird moving—coming closer, attacking, drifting away. In Rainforest, there is a study of hummingbirds. I render their agility, the fluttering of their small wings. The whole piece is facing time that is slowed-down, sped-up—it’s an acoustic madness. I also reach for movement in the space. A bird disappearing, vanishing—that’s the ending of El Condor. It drifts away, always at the same altitude, until there is only a singular dot, the note ‘A’. It might be worth looking for some non-obvious inspirations. In Egypt, I was fascinated not by the pyramids but by the desert. Sand, movement and color.
A desert also has a sound?
It hums. This association stems from the structure. The first part of my reportage from Egypt is entitled On the Brink of the Night and relates to the moment when day dawns above the desert. There is nothing, a delicate purple lifts, and suddenly there is everything. African sun. The second part is Buried Story. A muezzin’s singing spellbound in the sand. The third part is The Memory of the Desert, a dance motif, all the time whipped with the wind, swirling of the sand, a mirage. The sun, not necessarily in the desert, can be rendered in many different ways, too. A Stream and the Sun is a study of a stream in the Tatra Mountains, while A Landscape with a Dipper is about a small Tatra bird, which skips in two-steps across the water. Many painters have painted the sky, sun, sea. Each does it in a different way. It’s the same in music composition. Just instead of seeing, you start hearing it. For example, working on Uru Anna was listening to the stars. I’m long-sighted and I like watching the sky very much. The rest comes from the imagination. In the middle part of the piece, I zoom in on the Universe: spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, the Orion Nebula. One summer night by the Polish coast I lay with my son on hot sand, with beautiful stars above us. I suddenly felt as if I was levitating; the stars were getting closer and closer. The hot air worked like a magnifying glass. Almost physically, I felt the rippling of water in relation to the hot sky, to the Moon. This is reproduced in the musical composition; this Universe reflected in the sea. I took me a long time to be ready for this piece, while there are others that you put together in one go, as if a match was lit. Composing is a job in which you feel like you are taking drugs, even though you don’t. You enter into this other dimension and it is better to shut yourself away in a room, because each phone call can be a shock. It breaks everything, the whole train of thought. That’s why when I compose, I turn my phone off. On top of that, I am physiologically unfit to use a computer and a mobile phone—the signals are too strong, they give me terrible headaches. In our circles, it happens to some people.
You work with a pencil and a sheet of paper?
Always. I feel a connection to the faithful score paper. Later on, my younger colleagues type it all up on the computer, they are so good at it. But I carry a notebook with me, instead of a computer. Sometimes I need to jot something down and I don’t have my notebook with me. Then I use scraps of paper, napkins, tram tickets. Things can happen at any time. There are moments that immediately become music. But sometimes I have to work longer, sometimes a musical piece emerges like from the mist. You sense its aura, but don’t quite know how to do it. I have this memory linked to working on Fresco V Éternel, which has particular parts: a sea chant, a dawn psalm, a passacaglia of a torrential rain, a dusk psalm, and again, a sea chant—a centric arrangement of the form. I knew that there was a cataclysm in the middle part, but my inspiration failed me. Help came when I drove with my husband in a truck to Przemiłów and we were caught by a terrible downpour on our way. Rain pounded on the tin roof of the cabin. I immediately started jotting things down. I knew this was it—starting with drops, turning into a deluge. On the other hand, the first part of this piece, a sea chant, is about an ocean seen from a plane, about the very slow rippling of its surface. The connecting bit is the small waves on the Baltic Sea, the ones that foam. I have not seen ones like that anywhere else in the world. A delicate lace of sounds. Composers have always imitated nature. Consciously or not. Music of every tradition based on natural models reaches the listener in equally natural ways. In my opinion, to understand the music is to find a fraction of one’s self in it. Perfection that each artist tries to reach as much as he/she can. Bohdan Pociej described it as a Mozart particle; Władysław Tatarkiewicz as the obvious thing. That’s the way it is. And that is that.
Parts of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
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