(1) A lament for the failed ideals of a group of 1960s Cambridge graduates who all too quickly swap their literary dreams for coffee table books and hack journalism, the play was an elegiac threnody for soiled friendship and a descent from intellectual rigour and seriousness to philistinism.
(2) And some of the detail of the piece is based on something that seems straight out of a sci-fi movie: Penderecki wired up psychiatric patients to encephalogram machines and played them an earlier piece of his, the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and then translated the graphs of their brain-waves as they reacted to the music into the textures of Polymorphia .
(3) Polymorphia and Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima were written by Penderecki in the early 60s.
(4) But threnodies are not an argument, and memories are definitely not facts (Hobsbawm's pithy condemnation of oral history, delivered at a conference where I was due to speak, was terrifying).
(5) Even if you hear Penderecki's pieces on their own, away from the films, it's easy to understand the appeal of music such as Polymorphia or his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima .
(6) But because of the complexity of what's happening – particularly in pieces such as Threnody and Polymorphia, and how the sounds are bouncing around the concert hall, it becomes a very beautiful experience when you're there.
(7) There's another side to the liberation in Penderecki's music: the visual impact of his scores, the physical material musicians use to play pieces such as Fluorescences or the Threnody.
(8) Greenwood's 48 Responses to Polymorphia is, as its title suggests, an orchestral "remix" of the earlier work, while Popcorn Superhet Receiver was inspired by Threnody.