Through his Facebook page, Menon Dwarka reminded me (and a lot of other people, really) that Gorecki’s Third Symphony also played a musical role in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat:

The film came out in 1996, a few years after the hit recording and the same year that Lamb came out with their trip-hop homage to the composer.

1. He’s the all-time NHL points leader, and scored 92 goals in 1981-82, a single-season record. Gorecki or Gretzky?

2. He won first prize for his First Symphony at the UNESCO Youth Biennale in Paris in 1961, his earliest significant critical recognition outside of Poland, decades before a recording of his Third Symphony was a hit in the US and UK. Gorecki or Gretzky?

3. His wife was involved in an illegal betting scandal that resulted in the arrest and conviction of former NHL player Rick Tocchet. Gorecki or Gretzky?

4. In 1979, he quit his job at the Music Academy in Katowice to protest the Communist government’s refusal to let Pope John Paul II visit Poland. Gorecki or Gretzky?

5. He was dealt in 1988 by the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings in the NHL transaction forever known by hockey fans as “The Trade.” Gorecki or Gretzky?

On his blog The Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson surveys the Górecki obirtuaries from major papers in the US and the UK.

As Tom Service points out in the Guardian, Gorecki’s legacy is much more–and much more varied–than the Third Symphony that brought him worldwide notoriety in the 1990s:

The thing is, the Third Symphony is untypical of Górecki’s earlier work, and only partly reflects his later. Górecki began his musical life as an uncompromising modernist in Poland. His orchestral works of the late 50s and early 60s made him a new-music sensation at the Warsaw autumn festival, and his music was heard at the same bleeding-edge events as that by Xenakis and Boulez.

His listening suggestion: the 1956 Piano Sonata. He links to one version; here’s another:

I don’t know if I would call this bleeding-edge modernism, certainly not at all like Xenakis or Boulez, but it does show a more lively, aggressive side. At the same time, there is a directness and consistency of affect to the Piano Sonata that is similar to the Third Symphony.

Another piece to look at is the Second Symphony, commissioned by the Kosciuszko Foundation in honor of Copernicus’s 500th anniversary in 1972. It opens with the driving rhythm of the piano sonata and a final movement that presages Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.

If you want to hear Gorecki discussing his music, go to NPR’s Deceptive Cadence blog, which has a 1995 interview with the composer posted.

Gorecki’s Third Symphony was all the rage, particular in the UK, after the recording with Dawn Upshaw, London Sinfonietta, and David Zinman became a hit in 1993.

Lamb released a song named after the the composer that was a licensing bonanza (it was used I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a Femme Nikita TV episode, and a Tomb Raider video game). “Gorecki,” as musicologist Luke Howard points out, bears the characteristic mark of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs:

The symphony’s trademark sound–slow, thick strings; ethereal, slightly exotic sounding soprano melodies; static harmonies–was everywhere. Even in beer commercials. Howard hears it in the Death Scene to Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann also used Lamb’s lyrics in his Moulin Rouge!).

It’s hard to deny that this Polish composer, who passed away today, shaped our everyday musical environment–what we heard in movies, on the radio, on TV, and even in the mall–for a good ten years just as definitively as Kurt Cobain.