The musical composition Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (Tren ofiarom Hiroszimy in Polish), for 52 string instruments, was composed in 1959 by Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933), and took third prize at the Grzegorz Fitelberg Composers' Competition in Katowice in 1960. The piece swiftly aroused tremendous interest around the world and made its young composer famous. Musical composition is: an original piece of music the structure of a musical piece the process of creating a new piece of music // A musical composition A piece of music exists in the form of a written composition in musical notation or as a single acoustic event (a live performance... A string instrument (or stringed instrument) is a musical instrument that produces sound by means of vibrating strings. ... See also: 1958 in music, other events of 1959, 1960 in music, 1950s in music and the list of years in music // Events January 22 - Buddy Holly records some acoustic demos in his New York City apartment. ... Photograph of Krzysztof Penderecki. ... Motto: none Voivodship Silesian Municipal government UrzÄ…d Miasta Katowice Mayor Piotr Uszok Area 164. ... See also: 1959 in music, other events of 1960, 1961 in music, 1960s in music and the list of years in music // Events January 14 - Elvis Presley is promoted to Sergeant in the U.S. Army February 6 - Songwriter Jesse Belvin dies in an automobile accident in Los Angeles, California. ...

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!" Indeed, 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." Counterpoint is a musical technique involving the simultaneous sounding of separate musical lines. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (link will take you to calendar). ... A threnody is a song or hymn of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person (synonyms include dirge, coronach, lament, elegy, and requiem). ... October 12 is the 285th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (286th in leap years). ... For the Nintendo 64 emulator, see 1964 (Emulator). ... The city of Hiroshima ) is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture, and the largest city in the Chugoku region of western Honshu, the largest of Japans islands. ...

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. Musical Graphic notation is a form of Music notation it refers to the use of non-traditional symbols and text to convey information about the performance of a piece of music. ... In music, chromatic indicates the inclusion of notes not in the prevailing scale and is also used for those notes themselves (Shir-Cliff et al 1965, p. ... A quarter tone is an interval half as wide (aurally, or logarithmically) as a semitone, which is half a whole tone. ... In music, a consonance (Latin consonare, sounding together) is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance, which is considered unstable. ... Serialism is a rigorous system of composing music in which various elements of the piece are ordered according to a pre-determined ordered set or sets, and variations on them. ... This article is about the musical use of the word canon. For other uses, see canon (disambiguation). ... In music, the word texture is often used in a rather vague way in reference to the overall sound of a piece of music. ... In contrast to more traditional musical textures, sound mass composition minimizes the importance of individual pitches in preference for texture, timbre, and dynamics as primary shapers of gesture and impact. ... A tone cluster, in music and in Western tuning, is a chord or simultaneity comprised of consecutive tones separated chromatically. ...

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. Manic Street Preachers (often known colloquially as The Manics, and not The Preachers) are a Welsh rock band often associated with the Britpop scene, and were one of the biggest bands in Britain for a period in the late 1990s. ...