On his symphony David, the composer writes:
I began David - A Symphony in One Movement in Israel while on leave from my teaching duties at Yale and completed the score in New Haven in 1987. The symphony owes its title to Jerusalem, the city of David, king of Israel, where these melismatic melodies and heterophonic textures can be heard. Every stone in Jerusalem bears witness to the long and often painful history of the people who lived and created there, the city of ancient kings and prophets.
There are no direct quotes in this symphony from other musical sources. Instead, the diverse sounds of Jerusalem are evoked and reinterpreted in a very personal way, and the Middle Eastern melos serves both as a source of inspiration and as a meeting point where the disparate musical traditions merge. The piece is in one continuous movement, though the inner structure allows a division into several sections: a rather slow opening gradually becomes more agitated and is followed by fast, at times violent music. These volatile rhythms and textures are juxtaposed and superimposed before the symphony reaches its catharsis in the final Largo.
David - A Symphony in One Movement is dedicated to Krzysztof Penderecki
