• Composer Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, 1933
• Composer Harrison Paul Birtwistle, 1934

His name remained larged unknown outside Poland until the mid to late 1980s, and his fame arrived in the 1990s. Especially in 1992, 15 years after it was composed, a recording of his Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs — recorded with soprano Dawn Upshaw and released to commemorate the memory of those lost during the Holocaust — became a worldwide commercial and critical success, selling more than a million copies and vastly exceeding the typical lifetime sales of a recording of symphonic music by a 20th century composer. As surprised as anyone at its popularity, Górecki said, "Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music […] somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them. I feel that I instinctively knew what they needed." This popular acclaim did not generate wide interest in Górecki's other works, and he pointedly resisted the temptation to repeat earlier success, or compose for commercial reward.

Apart from two brief periods studying in Paris and a short time living in Berlin, Górecki spent most of his life in southern Poland.

Henryk Górecki was born on December 6, 1933, in the village of Czernica (Silesian Voivodeship) in, Silesia, southwest Poland. The Górecki family lived modestly, though both parents had a love of music. His father Roman (1904 - 1991) worked at the goods office of a local railway station, but was an amateur musician, while his mother Otylia (1909 - 1935), played piano. Otylia died when her son was just two years old, and many of his early works were dedicated to her memory. Henryk developed an interest in music from an early age, though he was discouraged by both his father and new stepmother to the extent that he was not allowed to play his mother's old piano. However, he persisted, and in 1943 was allowed to take violin lessons with Paweł Hajduga; a local amateur musician, instrument maker, sculptor, painter, poet and chłopski filozof (peasant philosopher).

In 1937, Górecki fell while playing in a neighbor’s yard and dislocated his hip. The resulting suppurative inflammation was misdiagnosed by a local doctor, and delay in proper treatment led to tubercular complications in the bone. The illness went largely untreated for two years, by which time permanent damage had been sustained. He spent the following twenty months in a hospital in Germany, where he underwent four operations. Górecki continued to suffer ill health throughout his life and, as a result, said he had "talked with death often".

Between 1951 and 1953, Górecki taught 10- and 11-year-olds at a school suburb of Rydułtowy, in southern Poland. In 1952, he began a teacher training course at the Intermediate School of Music in Rybnik, where he studied clarinet, violin, piano and music theory. Through intensive studying Górecki finished the four year course in just under three years. During this time he began to compose his own pieces, mostly songs and piano miniatures. Occasionally he attempted more ambitious projects — in 1952 he adapted the Adam Mickiewicz ballad Świtezianka, though his work was left unfinished. However, life for the composer during this time was often difficult. Teaching posts were generally badly paid, while the shortage economy made manuscript paper at times difficult and expensive to acquire. With no access to radio, Górecki kept up to date with music by weekly purchases of such periodicals as Ruch muzyczny (Musical Movement) and Muzyka, and by purchasing at least one score a week.

Górecki continued his formal study of music at the Katowice Academy of Music, where he studied under the composer Bolesław Szabelski, a former student of the renowned composer Karol Szymanowski. As Górecki was later to follow, Szabelski drew much of his inspiration from Polish highland folklore. Szabelski encouraged his pupil's growing confidence and independence by giving him considerable space in which to develop his own ideas and projects, so that several of early pieces Górecki wrote were straightforward in the type of neo - classicism, during a period when Górecki was also absorbing the techniques of twelve - tone serialism. He graduated from the Academy with honors in 1960.

In 1975, Górecki was promoted to Professor of Composition at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice, where his students included Eugeniusz Knapik, Andrzej Krzanowski, Rafał Augustyn and his son, Mikołaj.

Around this time, Górecki came to believe the Polish Communist authorities were interfering too much in the activities of the academy, and described them as "little dogs always yapping". As a senior administrator but not a member of the Party, he was in almost perpetual conflict with the authorities in his efforts to protect his school, staff and students from undue political influence. In 1979, he resigned from his post in protest at the government's refusal to allow Pope John Paul II to visit Katowice and formed a local branch of the "Catholic Intellectuals Club"; an organization devoted to the struggle against the Communist Party. He remained politically active through the late 1970s and 1980s. In 1991, he composed his Miserere for a large choir in remembrance of police violence against the Solidarity movement.

Górecki's music covers a variety of styles, but tends towards relative harmonic and rhythmical simplicity. He is considered to be a founder of the so-called New Polish School. Described by Terry Teachout, he said Górecki has "more conventional array of compositional techniques includes both elaborate counterpoint and the ritualistic repetition of melodic fragments and harmonic patterns."

His first works, dating from the last half of the 1950s, were in the avant garde style of Webern and other serialists of that time. At that time, Górecki's reputation was not lagging behind that of his near - exact contemporary and his satus was confirmed in 1960s when "Monologhi" won first prize. Even until 1962, he was firmly ensconced in the minds of the Warsaw Autumn Public as a leader of the Polish Modern School, alongside Penderecki.

During the middle 1960s and early 1970s, Górecki progressively moved away from his early career as radical modernist, and began to compose with a more traditional, romantic mode of expression. His change of style was viewed as an affront to the then avant garde establishment, and though he continued to receive commissions from various Polish agencies, by the mid 1970s Górecki was no longer regarded as a composer that mattered. In the words of one critic, his "new material was no longer cerebral and sparse; rather, it was intensely expressive, persistently rhythmic and often richly colored in the darkest of orchestral hues".

The first public performances of Górecki's music in Katowice in February 1958 programmed works clearly displaying the influence of Szymanowski and Bartók. The Silesian State Philharmonic in Katowice held a concert devoted entirely to the 24 year old Górecki's music. The event led to a commission to write for the Warsaw Autumn Festival. The Epitafium ("Epitaph") he submitted marked a new phase in his development as a composer, and was described as representing "the most colorful and vibrant expression of the new Polish wave". The Festival announced the composer's arrival on the international scene, and he quickly became a favorite of the West's avant garde musical elite. Writing in 1991, the music critic James Wierzbicki described how that at this time "Górecki was seen as a Polish heir to the new aesthetic of post  - Webernian serialism; with his taut structures, lean orchestrations and painstaking concern for the logical ordering of pitches".

Górecki wrote his First Symphony in 1959, and graduated with honors from the Academy the following year. At the 1960 Warsaw Autumn Festival, his Scontri, written for orchestra, caused a sensation among critics due to its use of sharp contrasts and harsh articulations. By 1961, Górecki was at the forefront of the Polish avant garde, having absorbed the modernism of Anton Webern, Iannis Xenakis and Pierre Boulez, and his Symphony No. 1 gained international acclaim at the Paris Biennial Festival of Youth. Górecki moved to Paris to continue his studies, and while there was influenced by contemporaries including Olivier Messiaen, Roman Palester and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

He began to lecture at the Academy of Music in Katowice in 1968, where he taught score reading, orchestration and composition. In 1972, he was promoted to assistant professor, and developed a fearsome reputation among his students for his often blunt personality. According to the Polish composer Rafał Augustyn, "When I began to study under Górecki it felt as if someone had dumped a pail of ice - cold water over my head. He could be ruthless in his opinions. The weak fell by the wayside but those who graduated under him became, without exception, respected composers". Górecki admits, "For quite a few years, I was a pedagogue, a teacher in the music academy, and my students would ask me many, many things, including how to write and what to write. I always answered this way: If you can live without music for 2 or 3 days, then don't write… It might be better to spend time with a girl or with a beer… If you cannot live without music, then write.” Due to his commitments as a teacher and also because of bouts of ill health, he composed only intermittently during this period.

By the early 1970s, Górecki had begun to move away from his earlier radical modernism, and was working towards a more traditional, romantic mode of expression that were also dominated by human voice. His change of style affronted the avant garde establishment, and although various Polish agencies continued to commission works from him, Górecki ceased to be viewed as an important composer. One critic later wrote that "Górecki's new material was no longer cerebral and sparse; rather, it was intensely expressive, persistently rhythmic and often richly colored in the darkest of orchestral hues". Górecki progressively rejected the dissonance, serialism and sonorism that had brought him early recognition, and pared and simplified his work. He began to favor large slow gestures and the repetition of small motifs.

The "Symphony No. 2, 'Copernican', Op. 31" (II Symfonia Kopernikowska) was written in 1972 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Written in a monumental style for solo soprano, baritone, choir and orchestra, it features text from Psalms no. 145, 6 and 135 as well as an excerpt from Copernicus' book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. It was composed in two movements, and a typical performance lasts 35 minutes. The symphony was commission by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York, and presented an early opportunity for Górecki to reach an audience outside of his native Poland. As was usual, he undertook extensive research on the subject, and was in particular concerned with the philosophical implications of Copernicus's discovery, not all of which he viewed as positive. As the historian Norman Davies commented, "His discovery of the earth's motion round the sun caused the most fundamental revolutions possible in the prevailing concepts of the human predicament".

By the mid 1980s, his work began to attract a more international audience, and in 1989 the London Sinfonietta held weekend of concerts in which his work was played alongside that of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. In 1990, the American Kronos Quartet commissioned and recorded his First String Quartet, Already It Is Dusk, Op. 62, an occasion that marked the beginning of a long relationship between the quartet and composer.

Górecki's most popular piece is his "Third Symphony", also known as the "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs" (Symfonia pieśni żałosnych). The work is slow and contemplative, and each of the three movements is composed for orchestra and solo soprano. The libretto for the first movement is taken from a 15th century lament, while the second movement uses the words of a teenage girl, Helena Błażusiak, which she wrote on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell in Zakopane to invoke the protection of the Virgin Mary.

The third uses the text of a Silesian folk song which describes the pain of a mother searching for a son killed in the Silesian uprisings. The dominant themes of the symphony are motherhood and separation through war. While the first and third movements are written from the perspective of a parent who has lost a child, the second movement is from that of a child separated from a parent.

Despite the success of the Third Symphony, Górecki resisted temptation to compose again in that style, and according to Allmusic continued to work, not to further his career or reputation, but largely "in response to inner creative dictates".

In February 1994, the Kronos Quartet performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music four concerts honoring postmodern revival of interest in new music. The first three concerts featured string quartets and the works of three living composers: two American (Philip Glass and George Crumb) and one Pole (Górecki).

His later work includes a 1995 commission for the Kronos Quartet entitled "Songs are Sung", "Concerto - Cantata" (written in 1992 for flute and orchestra) and "Kleines Requiem für eine Polka". Both "Concerto - Cantata" and "Kleines Requiem für eine Polka" (1993 for piano and 13 instruments) have been recorded by the London Sinfonietta and the Schoenberg Ensemble. "Songs are Sung" is his third string quartet and was commissioned in 1992, and inspired by a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov. When asked why it took almost thirteen years to finish, he replied, "I continued to hold back from releasing it to the world. I don’t know why."

During the last decade of his life, Górecki suffered from frequent illnesses. His Symphony No. 4 was due to be premièred in London in 2010, by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but the event was cancelled due to the composer's ill health. He died on November 12, 2010, in his home city of Katowice, of complications due to a lung infection. Reacting to his death, the head of the Katowice Music Academy, Eugeniusz Knapik, said "Górecki's work is like a huge boulder that lies in our path and forces us to make a spiritual and emotional effort". Adrian Thomas, Professor of Music at Cardiff University, said "The strength and startling originality of Górecki's character shone through his music [...] Yet he was an intensely private man, sometimes impossible, with a strong belief in family, a great sense of humor, a physical courage in the face of unrelenting illness, and a capacity for firm friendship".

Górecki had been awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest honor, just a month before his death. He received the award from Anna Komorowska, wife of Polish President Bronisław Komorowski, in his hospital bed.

He was married to Jadwiga, a piano teacher. His daughter, Anna Górecka - Stanczyk, is a pianist, and his son, Mikołaj Górecki, a composer.

When placing Górecki in context, musicologists and critics generally compare his work with such composers as Olivier Messiaen and Charles Ives. He himself said that he also feels kindred with such figures as Bach, Mozart and Joseph Haydn though he has said he feels most affinity towards Franz Schubert, particularly in terms of tonal design and treatment of basic materials.

Since Górecki's move away from serialism and dissonance in the 1970s, he is frequently compared to composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and Giya Kancheli. The term holy minimalism is often used to group these composers, due to their shared simplified approach to texture, tonality and melody, in works often reflecting deeply held religious beliefs. However, none of these composers has admitted to common influences. His modernist techniques are also compared to Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith and Dmitri Shostakovich.

In 1994 Boguslaw M. Maciejewski published the first biography of Górecki, entitled Górecki – His Music And Our Times. It includes a great deal of detail about the composer's life and work, including the fact that he achieved cult status thanks to valuable exposure on Classic FM. The serene Third Symphony (the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) became the focus of his incredible rise in popularity.

Discussing his audience in a 1994 interview, Górecki said,

I do not choose my listeners. What I mean is, I never write for my listeners. I think about my audience, but I am not writing for them. I have something to tell them, but the audience must also put a certain effort into it. But I never wrote for an audience and never will write for because you have to give the listener something and he has to make an effort in order to understand certain things. If I were thinking of my audience and one likes this, one likes that, one likes another thing, I would never know what to write. Let every listener choose that which interests him. I have nothing against one person liking Mozart or Shostakovich or Leonard Bernstein, but doesn't like Górecki. That's fine with me. I, too, like certain things.

Górecki received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. In a press statement, Concordia Professor Wolfgang Bottenberg described him as one of the "most renowned and respected composers of our time", and stated that Górecki's music "represents the most positive aspects of the closing years of our century, as we try to heal the wounds inflicted by the violence and intolerance of our times. It will endure into the next millennium and inspire other composers". In 2008, he received a further honorary doctorate from the Music Academy in Kraków. At the awarding ceremony a selection of the composer's choral works was performed by the choir of the city's Franciscan Church.

Birtwistle was born in Accrington, a mill town in Lancashire some 20 miles north of Manchester. His interest in music was encouraged by his mother, who bought him a clarinet when he was seven, and arranged for him to have lessons with the local bandmaster. He became proficient enough to play in the local military - style band, and also played in the orchestra which accompanied Gilbert and Sullivan productions and the local choral society's performances of Messiah. Birtwistle composed from around this time, later describing his early pieces as 'sub Vaughan Williams'.

In 1952 he entered the Royal Manchester College of Music in Manchester on a clarinet scholarship. While there he met fellow composers Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, who, together with pianist John Ogdon and conductor Elgar Howarth, formed the New Music Manchester group, dedicated to the performances of serial and other modern works.

Birtwistle left the college in 1955 then studied at the Royal Academy of Music and afterwards made a living as a schoolteacher. In 1957 he spent a short period of time in the sales office of Bells Asbestos and Engineering in Slough. In 1965 a Harkness Fellowship gave him the opportunity to continue his studies in the United States and he decided to dedicate himself to composition.

In 1975 Birtwistle became musical director of the newly established Royal National Theatre in London, a post he held until 1983. He was honored with a knighthood (1988) and as a Companion of Honour (2001). From 1994 to 2001 he was Henry Purcell Professor of Composition at King's College London. Birtwistle was the 1987 recipient of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. In 1995 he was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.

At the 2006 Ivor Novello Awards he criticised pop musicians at the event for performing too loudly and using too many clichés.

The artist Adam Birtwistle is his son.

It is not easy to link Birtwistle's music to any particular school or movement. For a time, he was described as belonging to the Manchester School, a phrase invented as a parallel to the Second Viennese School to refer to Birtwistle, Goehr and Maxwell Davies. The phrase has since somewhat fallen out of use, since the three composers were united only by their early studies in Manchester, not by a common musical style. Birtwistle's music is complex, written in a modernistic manner with a clear, distinctive voice.

His early work is sometimes evocative of Igor Stravinsky and Olivier Messiaen (composers he has acknowledged as influences) and his technique of juxtaposing blocks of sound is sometimes compared to that of Edgar Varèse. His early pieces made frequent use of ostinati and often had a ritualistic feel. These were later toned down as he adapted and transformed the techniques into more subtle methods. With its strong emphasis on rhythm, the music is often described as brutal or violent, but this analysis mistakes the strong sound world for an attempt to evoke violent actions. The explicit violence of his first opera Punch and Judy – in which the murder of Judy by her husband is much more shocking when performed live on stage than by glove puppets in the classic British seaside entertainment – can easily be misinterpreted as a clue to the intention of his abstract music. The style is stark and uncompromising.

Birtwistle's favourite image for explaining how his pieces work was to compare them to taking a walk through a town — especially the sort of small town more common in continental Europe than Britain. Such a walk might start in the town square. Having explored its main features, we would set off down one of the side streets. As the walk continues, we might glimpse the town square down different streets, sometime a long way off, other times quite close. We may never return to the square in the rest of the walk or we may visit a new part of it that was not explored initially. Birtwistle suggested that this experience is akin to what he does in the music. His image conveys the way that a core musical idea is altered, varied and distorted as the piece of music progresses. The core music forms a reference point to which everything else is directed, even when we are walking in a completely different direction. Sometimes we will be less aware that it is the same musical material we are hearing; sometimes we may have been listening for a while before realising that we have heard this music before (just as one might have been looking up the street before realising that it is the town square that can be glimpsed through the traffic). He was not, therefore, suggesting that we imagine this walk through the town as a literal explanation of what is happening in the music; he does not 'recreate' the effect in the music (as Charles Ives does in some of his orchestral pieces).

An early variant of this technique involved literally cutting up the music, an example being Verses for Ensembles. Having composed a portion of music, Birtwistle would then cut it arbitrarily into a number of sections, which he then rearranged randomly. He would then add introductions, epilogues and music to link them together. This method was intended to give the whole piece unity, by having musical material with its own inner coherence scattered amongst musical material that still related to the core material but did not necessarily relate to itself.

Birtwistle's method of working is also reflected in the events of the first Act of his opera Gawain. Up to the point where the Green Knight is kneeling in front of Gawain awaiting the axe blow that will cut off his head, the action has proceeded mainly in chronological order. With Gawain holding the axe aloft, the stage is suddenly blacked out and, within a minute, the action has been rewound to the point preceding the Green Knight's entry to the Court of Arthur. Events are played through again, though compressed and with various small alterations, through the beheading and into the subsequent events. The events on stage are not randomly ordered, but the one event is portrayed from more than one perspective.

For the opera The Mask of Orpheus, this entailed two sets of singer / actors performing contradictory versions of the one event from the Orpheus myths. This non - linear portrayal of events on stage gives the listener a means of approach to the abstract compositions, with the same musical ideas being repeated but with extensive variation. The result is music that is often very episodic in structure. A clear example occurs in Silbury Air in which a readily identifiable musical motif – a blow from the tom-toms followed by scurrying figures from the strings and woodwind – is elaborated in a number of different ways as the piece progresses.

As a result, even when he is not writing a visual piece involving stage action, Birtwistle's music is frequently theatrical in conception. The music does not follow the logic and rules of classical forms such as sonata form, but is structured more like a drama. Furthermore, different musical instruments can almost be seen to take the part of different characters in the drama. This is especially apparent in a performance of Secret Theatre (1984). For various portions of the piece, a number of the instrumentalists perform in a 'soloist' capacity. For this, they leave their seat in the ensemble and stand separately, to one side of the ensemble, returning to the group when they are no longer given that role. Though not normally signaled by a change of position, this sort of changing role is constantly seen in his music. Related to this is the use of geological imagery to explain the structure of his 1986 orchestral piece Earth Dances. A number of different layers of musical material are present. At any one time, a layer might be to the fore, while at other times it might be buried deep beneath the other layers and no longer as apparent.

Though well established and widely respected in the classical music world – modules on his music now feature in many university undergraduate music courses – Birtwistle was relatively unknown to the general public until the mid 1990s. Although he had been honored with a knighthood in 1988, two events brought him to public attention.

A group of anti - modernist musicians, including composers Frederick Stocken and Keith Burstein calling themselves "The Hecklers," organized a demonstration for the first night of the 1994 revival of Gawain at the Royal Opera House, London. They attended the performance and at its conclusion broke into a tirade of catcalls as part of their campaign to rid contemporary music of anything post - Romantic. Their criticism turned a relatively unimportant revival into a controversial event that attracted greater interest than it otherwise might have.

Birtwistle gained notoriety in 1995 when Panic was premièred on a live BBC television broadcast, in a prominent and unusual setting, on the second half of the Last Night of the Proms, which traditionally featured mainstream, popular and patriotic music.