Born in 1933 in Debica, Poland, into a household of Ukrainian Greek Catholic, Armenian, and German Protestant roots, Krzysztof Penderecki saw his family evicted from their apartment during the war and learned violin from a military bandmaster afterward. This episode follows how the 1956 lifting of Stalinist censorship opened Polish ears to Boulez and Webern, and how Penderecki answered with Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, a piece for 52 strings bowed behind the bridge and stacked into tone clusters that sound like tearing metal.

The hosts trace Fluorescences with its typewriters and musical saw, the student riot at the premiere of Canon, the political risk of the St. Luke Passion under a secular regime, and the scandalous major chord that ended it. They explain the B-A-C-H motif, his 1970s return to melody while teaching at Yale, the  ...