By 1963, Henryk Górecki had been abroad, twice, to Paris, Cologne, and Darmstadt, all pinnacles of modern music in Europe. Back home in Katowice, he was determined to develop his own style, one that would reject any artifice in its striving for simplicity and expressive force. Works such as his Genesis cycle epitomize that search. But there was another side of his development that was more nascent, and that was the desire to root his music in his native Polish soil, but in a way that wouldn't be exploitative or cliché. Three Pieces in Old Style was the first "Polish" work to see the light, and it has gone on to become one of his most performed compositions.

Scored for strings, Three Pieces is far removed in style from his other works of that period. There are simple modal melodies, clear classical rhythms, triadic or diatonic harmonies, and direct dance-like forms. The outer two pieces contain no accidentals whatsoever, the first being in the major mode, the second in the minor, and the third in the Dorian mode. There are a couple of features, however, that point to Górecki's more individual style as it developed a few years later. One is that he subdivides the strings so as to sustain the individual notes of the melody. This creates an "aura" around the line, a form of resonance that marks the music as being contemporary rather than from an earlier era. The harmonic progressions, too, are not strongly directional. The first piece, for example, rocks back and forth between two chords, providing a sense of motion on the immediate scale, but a sense of stasis on the larger scale. The last piece contains a melody (taken from a sixteenth century Polish part song) that is played in parallel, each layer being a step lower than the original. The diatonic sonority remains throughout, but the harmonization of the melody becomes thick and vibrant. Górecki would make use of this technique in a number of works, notably his Symphony No. 2, from 1972.

Thus, while the Three Pieces in Old Style seems something of an anomaly when looking at Górecki's work in chronological order, it actually served as a catalyst for the coalescence of the composer's mature style, combining modernist techniques with traditional materials.

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