The work was composed for the Donaueschingen Festival and performed by The New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra and Krzysztof Penderecki, who was making his first public appearance as a conductor. 

“Actions had no predecessor or successor. The composer never again returned to his isolated jazz-like experiment and never published its score, considering it outdated and inadequate in relation to the recording.”¹ As he himself expressed it, “writing a jazz piece when one is not an active performer poses serious problems. ... It is impossible to write a ‘finished’ piece before meeting the performers, because it has to be written ‘for’ specific musicians, in order to suit their musical and technical predispositions.”² Hence, Penderecki first set to work with merely a sketch of the score. “I also wrote the themes,” he said, “but the final shape was given to the piece by the performers during rehearsals and the concert itself.”³ 

Roman Kowal offered a highly convincing commentary to the events surrounding the presentation of Actions: “Penderecki stated in an interview that he needed an encounter with ‘something completely new,’ but—we can assume—on rights dictated by himself, according to his own norms and values derived from traditional musical studies. So he reached out to improvising performers, wiser with the experience of his predecessors who unfortunately created works that sounded a bit like jazz, written in jazz style, copying certain elements of jazz, but which were not jazz. First, as usual, there was a schematic sketch of the whole, then a more precise notation of the four-section piece, largely using notational symbols of his own invention that had been experimented in Fluorescences and Anaclasis. Penderecki gave freedom to jazz musicians who improvise their creation according to the rules and norms of jazz art in the free style .... The norms and rules typical of African-American jazz playing clashed with those of the composer, a follower of the European tradition. ... [For] Penderecki does not stylise his expression as jazz, he does not fake jazz, and nor does he fake jazz performance mannerisms. He morphs a jazz improvisational flow onto a form of his inventions, exercising—or attempting to exercise—control over its shape. Fourteen musicians “who have improvisation in their blood” ... cannot play completely freely within even the best designed form. ... [As a result, in Actions] two irreducible cultural systems meet or even perhaps clash; a kind of intertextual game of domination takes place in which the more expansive, aggressive African-American tradition prevails. Fortunately, the universal, transcultural laws and constraints governing perception and cognition have retained their value.”⁴
Mieczysław Tomaszewski, Penderecki. Bunt i wyzwolenie 
(Penderecki. Revolt and Liberation), vol. 1: Rozpętanie żywiołów 
(Unleashing the Elements), Kraków: PWM, 2008, 244–46. 


¹ R. Kowal, „Actions”. Krzysztof Penderecki w uniwersum kultur, tradycji i technologii, in Muzyka ery intertekstualnej, 299. 
² R. Kowal z Krzysztofem Pendereckim o „Actions”, Jazz Forum 1973:34–35. 
³ Ibid. 
⁴ R. Kowal „Actions” for Free Jazz Orchestra, in Współczesność i tradycja w muzyce K. Pendereckiego, Kraków, 1983.