“Feel the Emptiness”

When filming a documentary about his Third Symphony, Henryk Mikoaj Grecki insisted on filming on the grounds of Auschwitz concentration camp, saying "To understand me and my symphony, we must go there. . . .my symphony is not about Auschwitz. . . .But look around you.Feel the emptiness."In an effort to musically illustrate Grecki's "emptiness," this article argues that Grecki's music shares a few key threads, despite being written over a six-decade period and in styles ranging from Polish sonorism to repetitive tonality.Considering musical aspects that remained the same, as opposed to those that changed, can offer powerful insights about the composer's stylistic evolution.This paper introduces the term "micro-schemata" and applies it to the first corpus study of Grecki's oeuvre.Micro-schemata are defined as distinct but flexible stock musical concepts that recur as basic particles of Grecki's music.I have observed that 85.2% of Grecki's works with available scores-including all major works-use the micro-schemata outlined in this study.Each micro-schema can be viewed in a progression spanning the composer's three main stylistic periods: the "geometric period," romantic modality, and tonal sparsity.Alternatively, we can focus on the fixed microschemata, which remain constant while the context changes.