Download Notes on the Construction of Lutosławski`s Conception of Musical Plot*

Nicholas Reyland
Notes on the Construction
of Lutosławski’s Conception
*
of Musical Plot
In the field of Witold Lutosławski studies, the composer’s lecture ‘Notes on the
Construction of Large-Scale Closed Forms’ (c. 1967)1 has attained a talismanic,
near mythical, status. Often cited, occasionally quoted, rarely discussed in depth or
at length, it has nonetheless asserted a significant influence on writings about the
composer. The concerns discussed in this lecture, for instance, while hardly representative of the entirety of Lutosławski’s creative aesthetic in the period following
his turn to modernism in the late 1950s, tally with the weighting of the literature’s
focus on form over content in its assessment of a ‘compositional creed’ revolving
around ‘a dichotomy between shape and substance’ manifested in Lutosławski’s
music.2 This focus seems to have been influenced by the polemical thrust of the
text, which expresses rather more vividly than the earlier (and in some respects
I would like to acknowledge the support of the Music & Letters Trust, who funded my
flights to Australia for SIMS2004 to present the original version of this paper, plus the assistance
of the School of Music at Cardiff University, Charles Bodman Rae, Meredith Schilling and
Anja Masłowiec. I would also like to acknowledge Cardiff University’s funding of my trip to
study the Lutosławski Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, and to thank Felix Meyer
and the staff at the archive for their assistance during my stay in Switzerland. Adrian Thomas
and Jadwiga Paja-Stach both made many insightful comments on this paper. Finally, I would
like to express my gratitude to the ‘Lutosologists’ I met in Australia and Switzerland for being
so welcoming and encouraging.
1
This lecture probably dates from the first half of 1967 because, although it references
both movements of Symphony No. 2 (1965–7), which was premiered in its completed form in
June 1967, it does not use the term akcja, which Lutosławski began to deploy in the second half
of 1967. See Nicholas Reyland, ‘Akcja and Narrativity in the Music of Witold Lutosławski’.
Ph.D. thesis, Cardiff University, 2005, pp. 99–104.
2
Charles Bodman Rae, ‘Pitch Organization in the Music of Witold Lutosławski since
1979’. Ph.D. thesis., University of Leeds, 1992, p. 30.
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Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
much more important) ‘Problems of Musical Form’ (1962) Lutosławski’s frustrations with high modernism.
‘Notes’ was envisaged for Darmstadt and so for a pedagogical purpose (like
‘Problems’, which was written for Tanglewood). But it would also have been delivered in a context where Lutosławski could have expected to receive a more
informed and, probably, rougher critical ride (at least in comparison to his audience in Massachusetts). Lutosławski can therefore be seen fighting his aesthetic
corner in this lecture and, in doing so, becoming more openly polemical than
was often the case in his public statements. Whilst fighting that corner, however,
Lutosławski focuses on just one side of his approach to constructing a musical
form. The result is a distortion of his own compositional project that appears to
be one root of the ‘dichotomy’ trope apparent in many approaches to the interpretation of his music, including the strand of Lutosławski criticism which has
voiced scepticism regarding the existence of ‘solid musical content’ in his post1957 compositional output.
In the less well-known ‘Problems’, Lutosławski explains his crucial notion of
‘key ideas’. A ‘key idea’ is a ‘single structure or “sound object”… an independent
complex of sounds bounded in time’ and capable of determining ‘the cast of a whole
work just as themes do in classical music’ (8). Lutosławski’s lecture also explains
how he articulates the ‘moments of intense musical signification’ (7) unfolding
the quasi-logic of causational development relating to his ‘key ideas’, i.e. what he
later came to call his musical akcje (‘actions’ or ‘plots’). He calls such events ‘static’,
contrasting their role in presenting the main content of a piece to the subordinate
‘dynamic’ events which move to and from the turning points of his plots. In a note
scribbled in the margins of another Tanglewood lecture, ‘Pitch, the Interval and
Harmonic Aggregate’, Lutosławski refers to the działanie of his ‘key ideas’, a term
inferring, amongst other things, an object’s role, purpose, function or even agency.
In the ‘Pitch’ lecture, however, it relates primarily to intervallic quality and pitch
To borrow Stephen Walsh’s phrase from his entry on Lutosławski in Bruce Bohle, ed.,
International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians 10th edn, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975, p. 1287,
as cited in Steven Stucky, Lutosławski and His Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981, p. 106. Unlike a number of the other critics cited by Stucky, Walsh recorded an open
verdict, pending future research.
The page references in brackets in the main text refer to Lutosławski’s original lecture
manuscripts, which form part of the Lutosławski Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. The
articles have recently, and thankfully, appeared in print for the first time, as part of Zbigniew
Skowron’s invaluable edited collection of the composer’s writings, Lutosławski on Music, Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007.
‘Plot’, according to Andrzej Karcz, author of The Polish Formalist School and Russian
Formalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003), is the most appropriate English
translation of akcja if one wishes to imply the narrative-related sense of the word intended
through Lutosławski’s Polish usage (personal communication).
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Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
organisation, and therefore to the musical parameter at the centre, Lutosławski
makes clear, of his musical plots.
‘Notes’, on the other hand, primarily discusses what the composer termed ‘dynamic’ events, as opposed to the pivotal ‘static’ events to and from which ‘dynamic’
sections lead. Lutosławski does this in order to deal with rudimentary compositional matters of a potentially wide stylistic applicability – and thus, presumably, of
interest to a wider range of his imagined audience of Darmstadt students – while
seeking to persuade those musicians of the value of recapturing certain aspects of
past large-scale formal archetypes and their concomitant modes, as Lutosławski
understood it, of listener perception. He attempts to do this by demonstrating
ways in which elements common to a diversity of musical styles can be manipulated to induce comparable effects regardless of a composer’s personal musical
language. The lecture’s shortcoming (if read in isolation of Lutosławski’s other key
texts of the 1960s) is that it does not explain where ‘dynamic’ sections might lead,
because it focuses on transitional events but not, for the most part, on the content
of ‘static’ events (the contents of which would differ radically from composer to
composer). Consequently it seems plausible that the dissemination of ideas in this
lecture, which Lutosławski ultimately did not deliver at Darmstadt but ‘toured’
quite widely in the late 1960s and early 1970s, could have led, in part, to the
more negative strand of Lutosławski reception and to the view that, in his music, the expressive, sensuous, or rhetorical demands of large-scale form sublimate
the working through of musical content, filling-out pre-fabricated structures with
superficially engaging sounds that have no particular impact on the outcome of
a form.
Recent research places such views, and ‘Notes’, into a more rounded context, taking into account issues of potentially greater salience to understanding
Lutosławski’s compositional thinking, such as the ideas expressed in other key
texts (like ‘Problems’), and employing ideas theorised on that basis in analytical
accounts of a range of pieces from across Lutosławski’s long career (before and after the modernist watershed). This is not the place to repeat those analyses or theories, but briefly to summarize my view: a Lutosławski akcja consists of a chain of
See, for example, the discussion of a British delivery of this lecture in the early 1970s in
Philip Wilby, ‘Lutosławski and a View of Musical Perspective’, in John Paynter, Tim Howell,
Richard Orton and Peter Seymour, eds, Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, London:
Routledge, 1992, pp. 1127–45.
See my articles ‘Lutosławski, “Akcja” and the Poetics of Musical Plot’, Music & Letters 88/4, 2007, pp. 604–31 and ‘ “Livre” or Symphony? Lutosławski’s Livre pour orchestre and
the Enigma of Musical Narrativity’, Music Analysis (in press). A full literature survey of approaches to akcja in the Lutosławski literature can be found in the ‘Introduction’ to Reyland,
‘Akcja and Narrativity’, op. cit., pp. 1–35. Useful other texts include Irina Nikolska, ‘Symfonizm
Witolda Lutosławskiego’, Muzyka 37/3 (1992), pp. 37–51, Douglas Rust, ‘A Theory of Form
for Lutosławski’s Late Symphonic Works’. Ph.D. thesis, Yale University, 1994, and the final
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‘static’ events interlinked by ‘dynamic’ transitions; those ‘static’ events present and
develop the implications of ‘key ideas’, the most important characteristics of which
relate to Lutosławski’s approach to pitch organization and, primarily, to matters of
interval-class ‘quality’. His works unpack the implications of ‘key ideas’ (or groups
of such ideas) consisting of a small number of notes, and particularly the implications of their intervallic qualities (for instance, a Lutosławski piece’s plot and
thus drama might be fuelled by exploring the difference between equally compelling ‘key ideas’ articulating different intervallic qualities, much in the manner that
a tonal work might explore the conflicts or connections between the keys or modes
that its thematic groups bring into contact and conflict). Yet issues touched upon
in ‘Notes’, and not in ‘Problems’ or the other Tanglewood texts, add extra layers of
information to this definition. Invented and adapted rhetorical conventions help
to shape the presentation of an akcja’s main ‘static’ events; situations developed in
a Lutosławski akcja are sometimes ‘borrowings’ from the stage, literature and life;
further nuance is added to an akcja by Lutosławski’s deployment of gestures, topics
and other musical signifiers with strongly marked extra-musical and/or intertextual associations; and all of this rides the track of a carefully calibrated rollercoaster
of expressive intensity.
Reconsidering ‘Notes’ in this context is thus a potentially illuminating endeavour. The lecture draws attention to the subtlety and care with which Lutosławski
developed his means for drawing perceiver attention to his cardinal ‘static’ plot
events, but also adds nuance to our understanding of the manner in which his development of ‘key ideas’ interacts with another crucial layer of significations – indeed, to many listeners, it is this layer of signification that offers a route into the
detailed, pitch-related machinations of a musical plot. Lutosławski’s ‘purely musical’ arguments are enlivened by ‘extra-musical’ ‘borrowings’ and rhetorical gestures.
The remainder of this article therefore offers an introduction to, and critical interpretation of, Lutosławski’s statements on these matters in ‘Notes’, an analysis of
the String Quartet (the piece Lutosławski discusses in most detail in the lecture)
which seeks to demonstrate how one might interpret an akcja through both its
purely musical and extra-musical signifiers, and a consideration of the limited but
liberating play of meanings opened up to listeners by engaging with Lutosławski’s
akcje.
Something old, something new: Lutosławski’s rhetorical
conventions
Lutosławski’s primary technical concern in ‘Notes’ relates to the ways in which
fresh or refreshed musical conventions can be manipulated to engage a listener’s
chapter of Michael Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004, pp. 108–36.
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powers of anticipation and memory. From the perspective of an attempt to understand akcja, the conventions Lutosławski calls ‘borrowings’ are particularly fascinating because, on the one hand, they relate to content as much as formal events
and, on the other hand, they carry extra-musical resonances which could be heard
to supplement the harmonic and thematic signifiers of his musical plots. Whether
Lutosławski actually publicly presented the sections of his ‘Notes’ lecture on ‘borrowings’ is uncertain, however, as the passages in which he deals with ideas adapted from extra-musical sources have been bracketed off and, in one place, crossed
out entirely. The following survey of the lecture’s contents will therefore begin
by examining the polemical backdrop against which Lutosławski contextualized
his presentation’s main points. It then discusses ‘once-only conventions’ and other
ways in which Lutosławski depicts his emulation of rhetorical effects from earlier
musics before turning to the apparently contentious issue of his ‘borrowings’.
Lutosławski begins ‘Notes on the Construction of Large-Scale Closed Forms’
with a plea for musical comprehensibility and the composition of new pieces
capable of involving, as opposed to baffling or boring, contemporary audiences:
When composing large-scale closed forms, I always remember that what I am principally engaged in doing is organizing the process of perception of the work. To my
mind a piece of music is not only an arrangement of sounds in time but also the set of
impulses transmitted by those sounds to the listener and the reactions those impulses
awake in him. (1)
To clarify the kind of music he advocates, Lutosławski draws a distinction between two types of perception, ‘the active and the passive’:
The latter is how I would qualify the variety in which the listener’s attention is totally
absorbed by what he is hearing at a given moment. Active perception, on the other
hand, occurs when a part of the listener’s attention is, at certain moments, occupied in
assimilating what he has heard earlier or in anticipating, foreseeing, waiting for what
he is about to hear. (1)
Discussing recent music invoking a ‘passive’ response, Lutosławski’s statement that
such work is going through an interesting evolution and ‘reaching a high level of
distinction’ barely veils the pejorative tone of his ensuing description, which could
not only be applied to his particular bugbear, the moment form (he pays a slightly
back-handed compliment here to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ‘distinguished achievements in this field’), but could also be taken to reflect his views on other serial,
chance-based and improvised approaches to the construction of a musical form:
A composer working in this vein strings together a series of sound occurrences which
follow in no consequential order without revealing any ulterior pattern which might
guide the process of perception. All that matters is the ‘now’ of audition; no other
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effort is needed for the perception of the music except that required by listening at
a given moment. (2)
Lutosławski’s aesthetically insensitive dismissal of so much music groups a multitude of disparate approaches together under the umbrella of a kind of high
modernist Muzak. As this music is impossible or undesirable to follow either expressively or structurally, Lutosławski implies, all audiences can do is go with the
flow, letting it all wash over them. Read as music criticism, the limitations of such
statements are obvious (if admirably fearless, given his lecture’s intended point of
delivery in the lion’s den); as an illuminating contrast to the approach he deems
more valuable, however, they are genuinely useful.
Lutosławski explains the lack of perceptibly consequential relationships in
music only likely to encourage ‘passive’ listening through the absence of recognised
conventions akin to those he hears governing the quasi-logic of tonal pieces:
Now in the case of music the idea of a consequential relationship is very mistily defined. In contrast to logic, mathematics and so on, music does not deal in unambiguous elements, or indeed in any elements at all that have some meaning other
than a conventional one. Accordingly the notion of a consequential relationship can
be applied to music only metaphorically: the elements hang together solely on the
strength of accepted, familiar convention, and their concatenation bears only a passing
resemblance to the relationship between cause and effect. It works only if there exists
a convention to which the listener is sufficiently well-attuned for the composer to
be able to create the illusion of something self-evident with all the persuasiveness of
a logical chain of reasoning. (2)
These are astute phenomenological observations, acknowledging that musical logic
is at best a game of consequentiality involving culturally encoded conventions
and causal make-believe on the part of both creators and perceivers. Lutosławski’s
focus in ‘Notes’, however, is not on the conventions of that logic, but rather on
different types of musical convention capable of rousing listeners to the fact
that such musical processes may be occurring in the first place. His attention is
therefore turned to the rhetorical means available to contemporary composers ‘for
stimulating both the listener and his powers of anticipation’ (1).
To clarify the need for the development of such means, Lutosławski contrasts musical examples from J. S. Bach and Beethoven, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki
and Andrzej Dobrowolski. After bars 86–91 of Beethoven’s ‘Egmont’ Overture
(1809–10), for example, Lutosławski suggests listeners should be surprised when,
instead of hearing a repeat of bars 88–89, they hear bars 92–95, where the music
veers unexpectedly into A major. We are surprised, Lutosławski says, because we
listen actively to such music, ‘switching on our powers of anticipation… because
of the existence of conventions with which we are conversant’ (3) – in this case the
dynamics of tonal harmony. He then discusses an excerpt from Górecki’s Scontri (1960), suggesting ‘there is no way of saying what may come next’ and that
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what follows his excerpt ‘strikes us neither as inevitable nor totally unexpected’
(3). Consequently, the modern composer seeking to compose a large-scale closed
form must ‘find ways of activating the listener’s memory and anticipation despite
the absence of recognised conventions which could serve as a cue’ (4). One must
replace the illusion of rhetoric, as well as the make-believe logic, of tonality.
Lutosławski states that he has recently been ‘hunting’ for such devices and goes
on to describe one of his discoveries as the ‘once-only convention’. Lutosławski explains that ‘ “once-only conventions” serve chiefly to stimulate the listener’s powers
of anticipating what is about to take place in a work… their purpose is to direct
the attention forward, that is, into the immediate future’ (6). These are the kind of
events he described in ‘Problems’ as ‘dynamic’. They achieve their effect of ‘jogging
the listener into anticipation of what may be about to occur [through] the introduction of changes which are of a continuing nature and point in a single specific
direction’ (9). In this context, he notably contrasts ‘once-only conventions’ to ‘passages which might be called static’ (9) and thus be considered moments of greater
significance advancing a piece’s musical plot.
The nature of ‘once-only conventions’ has been widely misunderstood in the
literature to date, presumably as a result of the limited access available to this
lecture during the composer’s lifetime. Charles Bodman Rae, who was able briefly to consult the lecture manuscript, provides a representative account, claiming
that the simplest form of ‘once-only convention’ is a repeated idea established in
a Lutosławski work ‘in order to play with the listener’s expectation of its recurrence’ and giving examples including the repeated octave Cs in the String Quartet
(1964) and the oboe refrains in Epitaph (1979). Rae is correct to link the term
to Lutosławski’s ‘desire to simulate effects typical of music composed within the
general framework of tonal conventions’, but his particular definition is debatable. Such recurring features certainly exist, but they may need to be reclassified
(probably as characteristic varieties of interventional and refrain-like ‘key ideas’
occurring, on the whole, within ‘static’ events). Yet Lutosławski’s ill-chosen terminology must take the lion’s share of the blame for any misunderstanding. As with
his potentially confusing use of the terms ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ (no music is ever
literally static, while all music is literally dynamic), mix-ups regarding ‘once-only
conventions’ are understandable, not least because, as his description of them in
‘Notes’ makes clear, such gestures are in fact intended to be individual compositional realisations of well-worn musical conventions.
Some of Lutosławski’s examples of ‘once-only conventions’ in ‘Notes’ achieve
their effects through rudimentary means; others are more musically sophisticated.
The ten-second crescendo from piano to forte at Fig. 89 in the first movement
of Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux (1962–3), for example, creates a (‘dynamic’) ex Rae, ‘Pitch Organisation’, op. cit., p. 32.
Ibid., p. 32.
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pectation of immanent arrival at a significant (‘static’) event, Lutosławski argues,
because ‘loudness has its limits and we realise that it will not be long before these
are reached’ (9). This expectation is duly satisfied when the choir enters with a fifteen-second texture based around the resplendent twelve-note sonority (pairing
interval classes 2 and 5) at the words ‘Pensées à la nage merveilleuse’. Yet a ‘onceonly convention’ might ‘take place not only within the span of short sections but
also in the course of whole stages in the development of a large-scale form’ (11).
Lutosławski stresses the crucial importance of this possibility in the construction
of a composition, thereby demonstrating how he imagined ways in which larger
spans of his music, made up at the local level of variegated textures and ideas,
could gradually accrue a sort of macro-dynamism (not necessarily solely in the
form of a macro-rhythmic accelerando). He gives the example of ‘Direct’, the second movement of Symphony No. 2 (1965–7):
the rhythm, tempo and, to some extent, the scoring undergo a parallel, gradual transformation over a period of fifteen or so minutes. This transformation acts as a kind of
scaffolding supporting the whole form. It consists of several sections with a great deal
of variety, all of them, however, subordinated to a common principle which enables
them to come over as a single whole. (11)
The common principle is dynamism, which in ‘Direct’ creates the accumulating
wave of development that makes the movement such a contrast to its predecessor,
‘Hésitant’.
In contrast to ‘once-only conventions’, which are designed to compel the listener to anticipate what will happen next, Lutosławski also discusses the need for
devices capable of directing the listener’s thinking ‘back into the immediate past,
to make him recall what he has just heard and instinctively piece together a section of music’ (6), thus providing an opportunity actively to gather one’s thoughts
and summarize a section’s contents before perceiving the next part of a piece. To
do this, Lutosławski suggests, ‘we can fall back on certain typical mental reactions
which have been partly shaped by the old musical conventions’ (6), via phenomena capable of replicating the function of the cadence in tonal music. The most
obvious solution, he says, is to insert a hiatus, thereby giving ‘the listener a chance
to take brief stock of the preceding passage and prime himself for the next one’
(6). He gives as an example of this effect the brief pause between Fig. 4 and 5 in
Symphony No. 2.
Another quasi-cadential effect can be achieved, Lutosławski suggests, through
‘changes in tempo, dynamics, tone-colour, disposition of sounds and so on’ (7), as
long as those changes occur suddenly, as at the start of section B of the first movement of Jeux vénitiens (1960–1). Lutosławski also indicates a large-scale punctuation device capable, he proposes, of causing us ‘automatically [to] fuse in our
memory everything that has gone before from the very beginning’ (8). As an example of this, he cites the entrance of the chorus in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
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(1817–23), ‘which immediately defines the previous movements as a separate
whole, that is as the instrumental part of the symphony’ (8). A more acute analytical example provided relates to Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître (1953–5)
and the moment when, Lutosławski notes, low tam-tam pitches are heard for
the first time and ‘we become fully aware that everything beforehand has taken
place in a medium and high register’ (8). Both of these examples can be related to
Lutosławski’s own compositional practice and, not least, to the changes of tessitura
and orchestration that mark the start of ‘Direct’.
Something borrowed: Lutosławski’s theatrical gestures
In comparison to the forthright observations thus far in the lecture, the self-censorship and doubt implied by Lutosławski’s bracketing and (in the case of one
concluding reference) crossing-out of sections referring to the topic of extra-musical ‘borrowings’ in the ‘Notes’ manuscript is intriguing. These sections do not
seem to have been removed merely to expedite delivery of the lecture. Like most
of Lutosławski’s other lecture scripts, ‘Notes’ is sixteen pages long without the
cuts. Reticence to discuss such ideas (perhaps because he considered them perfumed with the scent of Romanticism) in Darmstadt might have been another
factor in the apparent edits. Yet these devices are also rather different from the
other conventions discussed in ‘Notes’, in that they are not merely rhetorical in
their intended function. Lutosławski’s editing may reflect this disparity and an
awareness that his lecture fails convincingly to tie together its two main themes.
However, Lutosławski’s apparent uncertainty about the wisdom of including these
comments probably related primarily to his fear that, in broaching such matters,
he would lead his critics into programmatic temptation. Given the complexity
of the issues broached by such considerations, this is an understandable concern.
Lutosławski walked the fine (and ultimately illusory) line between the ‘purely
musical’ and ‘extra-musical’ with his ‘borrowings’,10 enriching the structures and
signifying potential of his musical plots but, in doing so, risking misreadings of
his intentions – misreadings potentially exacerbated by his inability or reluctance
adequately to explain their role in his music.
In ‘Notes’ Lutosławski immediately signals that he wishes to downplay the
matter of his ‘borrowings’:
The second, much less important, area into which the search for ways of organizing
the perception of a large-scale form has taken me lies in the direction of borrowings
from the other arts, principally the theatre. This can be fruitful when the aim is to
create more intricate formal situations in which the simple, elementary once-only
conventions I have mentioned are no longer enough. (5)
This issue, and Lutosławski’s critical paroxysms when directly confronted by its logical
ramifications, is elegantly dealt with by Klein in Intertextuality, op. cit., pp. 112–14.
10
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This highlights the contrast between ‘borrowings’ and the conventions previously
discussed: these examples relate to more ‘intricate formal situations’ because, almost
paradoxically, the ‘borrowings’ inflect the presentation of content; indeed arguably,
for many listeners, they are music’s primary content, and the key to unlocking the
specific mysteries of a musical argument’s drama. Continuing, however, he further
qualifies his attention to these ‘less important’ matters, again stressing their minor
role in his music while nevertheless implying aspects of their significance:
Of course, looking beyond the boundaries of pure music for bearings in other spheres
is something of a makeshift. But you have to remember that in the realm of pure music
there cannot be found at present any durable, universally known conventions to which
reference could be meaningfully made… In these circumstances, to venture outside
music as such in search of some familiar phenomenon on whose sequence might be
modelled the construction of a music form seems a natural reflex. The drawback with
this procedure, of course, is not only that it detracts from the homogeneity of music
but also that it is bound to be arbitrary in its methods of conveying the grammar of
non-musical idioms into the language of music. This weakness is offset to some extent
by the freshness that music gains through such transplants from the outside. (5–6)
Such statements toe the high modernist/formalist line – to a degree. Yet they also
indicate how, for Lutosławski, the creation of musical ideas inspired through an
association with primarily non-musical concepts sometimes played a significant
role in his compositional process. As he says, he ‘would rather not pass over these
matters since they form an element in the process of composition’ (13). Neither,
one might add, should analysis of his music; the problem is how to deal with them
judiciously.
‘Borrowings’ appear to have played two primary roles for Lutosławski. First, by
borrowing dramatic situations from the stage, literature, real-life events, etc., he
could shape the interactions of his music’s ‘key ideas’ in fresh and interesting ways.
Second, they provided a means by which Lutosławski could weave extra-musical significations into his primarily purely musical arguments, thereby permitting
suitably acculturated listeners to read additional symbolic nuances into his reimagining of tonal thematic and harmonic logic in his large-scale closed forms.
The traces of both categories in his music may, therefore, be ‘imprecise, slippery,
arguable, and def[y] purely musical analysis’ (13), but they do not defy all analysis,
including, one might argue, the interpretative skills of sympathetic listeners aware
of the wealth of gestures and topics, theatrical conventions and types of situation
Lutosławski apparently drew upon. ‘Borrowings’ do not, of course, relate to programmatic extra-musical plots ‘behind’ Lutosławski’s pieces; or, if they occasionally do relate to something along those lines, unambiguously communicating that
creative source is not their primary function. They do, however, permit listeners to
confer further connotations of meaning onto a musical plot’s illusion of logic. In
doing so, Lutosławski’s ‘borrowings’ encourage a consideration of ways in which
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his pieces might be read for a wide range of formal, expressive, dramatic, sociopolitical and cultural resonance. Lutosławski’s ‘borrowings’ do not, to paraphrase
V. Kofi Agawu, reveal what his music means; they do, however, play a role in determining how his music means (and thus what his music might be imagined to
mean by perceivers).11 In his ‘Notes’ lecture, Lutosławski’s description of his String
Quartet is especially revealing in this context.
Something true? ‘Notes’ on a String Quartet
Lutosławski depicts the opening of his String Quartet as follows:
In its patterning there can be detected an analogy with a stage play. It opens with
a soliloquy by the first violin. It is composed of a number of very brief phrases which
are punctuated from time to time by a four-note refrain. Each of these phrases represents a separate musical idea, none of which are developed but instead are discarded
after a brief while. The structure of the phrases is characteristic: each of them starts
with a fair amount of energy which is quickly exhausted. (13–14)
He then expands upon the nature of this ‘borrowing’ of a soliloquy:
The rhythm is to a certain extent modelled on human speech with its typical inflections to match meaning and accent phrases, words and even syllables. It should not be
supposed from this that the music is here intended actually to say something literally.
All that it has borrowed from speech is its outward habit, its purely vocal features and
the manner in which it flows in time. (14)
One might deduce from this description that the solo opening of the String Quartet can be interpreted as a simulacrum of a virtual persona presenting a number
of statements or suggestions,12 all of which run out of energy and lead instead to
obsessive reworkings, by that musical persona, of a germinal phrase (the four-note
cell). The soliloquy, after all, was modelled on speech patterns and theatrical gestures, apparently not with the intention of communicating actual words (although
one cannot help but wonder if Lutosławski had a particular soliloquy in mind as
a compositional template), but in order to retain the ‘outward habit’ of such statements. The music thereby expressively connotes vocal rhythm, volume, timbre and
pitch in different ways which combine gesturally to give the impression of rhetori V. Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 5.
12
Models for such analyses can be found in Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, Gregory Karl, ‘Structuralism and Musical Plot’, Music
Theory Spectrum 19, 1997, pp. 13–34, and Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity
and Signification, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 236–40 and 249–73.
11
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Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
cal energy being accumulated and then depleted. An obvious comparison can be
made here to the start of Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto (1969–70).
An analytical sketch of the String Quartet’s opening can begin to address the
question of how such ‘borrowings’ may be read to combine with the primarily harmonic and thematic discourse of a Lutosławski akcja. The first violin begins alone,
playing fragmentary ideas in which only interval classes 1 and 6 are heard between
its consecutive notes. A yet more restrictive thematic germ – the piece’s first ‘key
idea’ – underlies this pattern-making: a four-note refrain in which consecutive
semitones etch a minor-third cluster motif, to which the violin returns more explicitly each time its pattern-making runs out of energy. (The pitch construction of
the passage reveals many interlocking versions of this four-note motif: G, A flat, A,
B flat, then E, E flat, D, D flat, then C, C sharp, D, E flat, etc.) In addition, it may
be structurally significant that the line, after beginning on g, rises to a peak on g´´
at the height of the avvivando, before sinking back to an accommodating d flat´
midway between g and g´´, thus suggesting an underlying diminished seventhlike framework of i.c. 3s.13 It may also be notable that, while the soloist’s rhythms,
dynamics and staccato articulations appear designed to suggest tentativeness, the
violin line is marked espressivo, eloquente. This music seeks the eloquence of fluent
development – a quality briefly achieved at the poco avvivando and crescendo to
mp before the ‘soliloquy’ sinks back beyond its initial tempo through a composedout deceleration. The dynamic level also fades from pp to ppp as the opening’s
energy levels deplete.
What is this music seeking eloquently to say or to do? ‘Actively’ combining
the various implications of the passage, one might interpret the musical discourse
as follows: the music’s simulacrum of an experiencing consciousness can be heard
to be seeking to move beyond the restrictive boundaries of a ‘key idea’ defined, at
this stage, by the motivic pitch-class set 4-1 and, more generally, by the intervalclass quality 1+6 with a focus on the note G. However, the violin’s major-seventh
and minor-ninth leaps, and the overlapping motivic refrains that follow, begin
successfully to distort the underlying pattern, straining the strictness of the violin’s fealty to the ‘key idea’. Urgent leaps pressurize the motive, especially during
the precipitando, where impetuousness leads to a flowing developmental eloquence
unattained in the first section of the ‘soliloquy’. This moment, crucially, begins
to exceed the boundaries of the ‘key idea’ (the violin’s refrains overlap and distort its coherence); the music’s nascent sense of pitch centre also shifts (from G
to C). When the music returns to the opening tempo, an even greater variety of
dynamics, articulations and durations – in tandem with the music’s most ardent
quasi-vocalisations yet – then continue the attempt to unlock the restrictions of
This article follows the convention, when indicating specific registers, in which c = middle
C, c´ = the C an octave above middle C, C = the C an octave below middle C, C´ = the octave
below that, etc.
13
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Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
the four-note set; the eerie series of E flats in the midst of this activity also cuts
against the grain of events thus far (while anticipating a crucial moment to come).
The music, it seems, is trying to do or say something different, but has not yet been
successful in this venture.
The ‘borrowing’ for the link between the end of the ‘soliloquy’ and the next
section of the String Quartet’s introduction, Lutosławski states in ‘Notes’,
is a stage situation in which a character breaks off in mid-speech after a short sentence
repeated more and more softly, having perhaps noticed the presence of other persons
who are not supposed to hear what he has been saying. These other people then begin
to speak. (14)
It seems unlikely that listeners could grasp the origins of this ‘borrowing’ and
deduce that particular meaning. The textural contrast formed by the entry of the
three other instruments is, however, a striking example of his music gaining ‘freshness’ from a ‘borrowing’, as both what the new ‘people’ say and how they say it
begins to imply a tension between the first violin’s individualistic attempts to develop virtuosic new ideas and an alternative state suggested here: a group of passive
bystanders accepting the apparent restrictions. The new situation begins with the
second violin, viola and cello exploring the quartertonal space between c and B,
thereby performing the most restrictive examination yet of the semitonal building-block behind the ‘key idea’. Tentative echoes of melodic leaps in the ‘soliloquy’
then develop in each part, but that is as far as the music progresses here. The dull
con sordino tone, lacklustre limited-aleatory texture and general lack of progression
all feel like the schematic and sensuous antithesis to the first violin’s ‘soliloquy’. As
Lutosławski noted,
the listener might be led to imagine that this passage will run for a long time. The
musical discourse is, however, abruptly cut short by the entry of the first violin. At
the moment the energy [of this intervention] reaches its peak, with C having been
repeated for the fifth time, there follows a three-second break, after which C is once
more repeated piano. Once again there is a distinct analogy with a line spoken excitedly and suddenly broken off as a result of some outside factor or some inner psychological impulse. The final piano repetition of C brings the incursion of the first violin
to an end and at the same time opens a new episode in which the first violin is joined
by the viola and second violin. (15)
This is the end of Lutosławski’s description in his ‘Notes’ lecture of the String
Quartet’s ‘borrowings’. He does not go on to mention, for example, the octave
Cs initiated by the cello at Fig. 4, which then ricochet throughout the ensemble,
calling the piece’s introduction to a halt. One might feel, however, that a tension
between attempts to develop individuality and intimations of a more passive acceptance of uniformity has been established well before the incursion of that quasicadential event. Previous to the octave Cs, for instance, the first violin’s più mosso at
21
Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
Fig. 2 makes its own incursion with an initially more forceful and confrontational
development of ideas from the ‘soliloquy’. Notably, the intervallic content of the
underlying ‘key idea’ changes here, too, stretching to admit new interval-classes.
Developmental freedom, in an intervallic sense (and interval is what matters most
in the engine room of Lutosławski’s musical plots), seems to be occurring. One
might, in turn, hear this process continuing when the first violin’s final C is followed at Fig. 3 by the group texture it forms collaboratively with the second violin
and viola, which also develops ideas from the ‘soliloquy’. The music’s amalgamation of personae could therefore be heard to be shifting its weight behind the
concept of development towards a different goal (although the indifferente into
which this texture deteriorates then feels like a partial regression to the passivity
of Fig. 1). Consequently, when the cello interrupts with its quasi forte octave Cs,
dispersing the vaguely cooperative trio, one might wonder if Lutosławski had another theatrical ‘borrowing’ in mind: a clandestine meeting of plotters scattered by
a booming ‘who goes there?’.
This intervention resolutely closes the opening of the String Quartet and, following Lutosławski’s arguments in ‘Notes’, can be heard to invite the listener to
‘sum up’ that which has just been experienced. Following the above line of thought,
one might be tempted to summarize events thus far as symbolizing a desire for
difference (and perhaps greater liberties) vs. an acceptance of the status quo (and
restriction). Yet the cadential gesture also presents a musical thought of significance in its own right, in the form of a second ‘key idea’ articulating the piece’s
most restricted event yet: octave Cs played homophonically by the entire quartet.
Continuing the reading, therefore, as the ‘Introductory Movement’ proceeds one
might hear further attempts to develop discursive musical liberties (intervallic,
textural and motivic developments of the first ‘key idea’) being halted by further
incursive unities (the homophonic octaves of the second ‘key idea’). The ‘Main
Movement’ then begins on E flat (as anticipated in the soliloquy) with the most
impetuous and sustained bid for developmental freedom yet. The piece’s climax,
however, subverts the energy of that attempt, pivoting around a development of
the interventional second ‘key idea’ at Fig. 39. This harmonizes its homophonic Cs
with a verticalisation of the first ‘key idea’, forging a doubly restrictive sound that
sublimates the first ‘key idea’ and its desire to develop, and channelling the movement’s developmental momentum into a vehement yet inconclusive appassionato.
For Lutosławski, ‘key idea’ one’s interval-class pairing of 1 and 6 lay at the ‘dissonant’ end of a spectrum of harmonic qualities from the pairing 2 plus 5, or major
seconds and perfect fourths and fifths, which he heard as a ‘pure’ or ‘consonant’
quality. The più mosso of Fig. 2 hinted at a new direction in which the music might
develop in order to free itself from the restrictions of its initial material. And it is
the i.c. 2+5 ‘quality’ which comes to fruition in the chorale at the end of the climax
of the piece, where a release from ‘key idea’ one’s constraints is briefly achieved
with the opening C sharp, E flat, G flat, G sharp chord – the pitch-class set 4-23
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Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
or [0, 2, 5, 7] which often serves as a quasi-triadic summing-up of the ‘consonant’
interval-class pairing 2+5 in Lutosławski’s music. The music then slips back towards ideas derived from its initial materials, and towards the verticalisation of
set 4-1 sustained at the end of the chorale. The climax can therefore be heard as
an expressive but not syntactically climactic termination of processes inaugurated
at the start of the first movement. The chorale-like texture which follows almost
sounds shell-shocked: there has been no classicist synthesis here, nor a modernist
balancing-out of competing forces. Indeed, a funèbre chorus of lamentation built
around the original ‘key idea’ then unfolds, anchored to the work’s opening pitch
(G) and ‘borrowing’ topics of lament including the theatrical Greek chorus and
the musical pianto motif.14 The end of this purely musical plot, it seems, is being
marked extra-musically as a tragic wrong-turn and thus, perhaps, with a sense of
failure to resolve the piece’s competing concerns. The gloom, consequently, cannot be entirely dispelled by the wispy reminiscences of earlier developments into
which the music evaporates.
A liberating action
Even a provisional analytical interpretation such as the one sketched above begins
to indicate ways in which the different elements of a Lutosławski akcja might
combine to signify an abstract, but not indescribably vague, variety of musical
plot. It may also suggest ways in which the more ‘slippery’ and ‘imprecise’ signifiers embedded in an akcja could tempt one to situate one’s reading somewhat
more concretely, but perhaps injudiciously. Radio announcer Christopher Cook,
for instance, prefaced a live BBC broadcast of the String Quartet in 2003 with the
following provocative statement:
[L]iberty is the guiding principle behind Witold Lutosławski’s String Quartet… Listen to this quartet and your ear is beguiled by music of a compelling logic. Look at
the score, however, and it seems completely illogical. Instead of the four voices of the
quartet… what you see are four blocks of musical material, building blocks really, because each player is required to enlarge at will on this material… The players choose
their own rhythms and tempi, and they can also repeat the given material several times
if they want to…
It was the music of John Cage, the American composer, that encouraged
Lutosławski to change the way in which he composed, to take a kind of deep breath of
musical freedom. So, in Communist Poland in the 1960s, this string quartet becomes
14
See Klein, Intertextuality, op. cit., pp. 121–34, and Maja Trochimczyk, ‘ “Dans la
Nuit”: The Themes of Death and Night in Lutosławski’s Oeuvre’, in Zbigniew Skowron, ed.,
Lutosławski Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 96–124, for a discussion of
tragic topics in Lutosławski’s music; see Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 17–19, for a discussion of the pianto motif.
23
Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
both an act of resistance and a passionate argument for personal liberty well beyond
the concert hall.15
This interpretation problematically blends factual inaccuracies with flights of socio-political fancy,16 coming to its conclusions about liberty not in response to the
‘compelling logic’ of the music’s sounds but rather through a creative misreading
of the appearance on the page of Lutosławski’s limited-aleatory textures (hence ‘an
act of resistance, and a passionate argument for personal liberty’ from a composer
working in a communist country as opposed to the world of ‘freedom’ symbolized
by ‘Cage, the American composer’ and chance procedures). The choices open to
the players in such textures are, of course, actually severely circumscribed. Liberty
is therefore apparent, not real, in the grain of the musical discourse – an irony of
Lutosławski’s deployment of limited-aleatory textures in compositions from Jeux
vénitiens onwards, but a tension also refracted, perhaps, in other ways in his akcje.
In the String Quartet’s plot, for instance, the opposition between developmental
and non-progressive materials, and thus between intimations of liberty and restriction, carries a potent symbolic charge felt elsewhere in Lutosławski’s music of
the 1960s and 1970s (and, indeed, in a much wider modernist repertoire). Albeit
inadvertently, Cook’s reading could thus be read to approach a deeper truth.
But that freedom of interpretation may be the finer point, as opposed to the
idea that any reading will uncover the ‘truth’ of the plot’s theatrical, real-life or historical inspirations (if they exist), let alone its meaning for the composer. Undisclosed extra-musical inspirations are primarily an issue for biographers and poietic
detectives, and there is a clear danger in over-privileging such matters in one’s analytical interpretations – a sense of danger intensified by the potential vulgarity of
the ultimately circumstantial speculations that result. It is more important to note
that Lutosławski’s musical plots appear capable of invoking such conjecture in the
first place, as listeners are enticed to feel and understand something in response to
the saturation of signifiers in his pieces, and thus to the plot-like progressions of
their large-scale formal patterning. In fusing codes of signification ranging from
musical topics and theatrical ‘borrowings’ to those implying a post-tonal re-imagining of tonal harmonic and thematic logic – and by articulating their interactions
with rhetorical musical conventions old, borrowed and new – Lutosławski’s plots
may ultimately better be read as temporally unfolding metaphor structures which
permit one to short-circuit the gap between their somewhat ambiguous, plot-like
signs and a host of potentially signified stories.17
15
Introduction to a live recital by the Karol Szymanowski Quartet which was broadcast
on BBC Radio 3 on 25 August 2003.
16
At no point, for example, do the players ‘enlarge at will’ on the given material or freely
select their own rhythms and tempi.
17
Even more so than the issue of musical narrativity (see Reyland, ‘ “Livre” or Symphony’, op. cit., for a discussion thereof ), the literatures and arguments concerning metaphor and
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Witold Lutosławski Studies 2 (2008)
During interpretative acts such as these, a Lutosławski piece accrues meaning
by enmeshing intertextually with an individual’s capacity to find meaning within
it. Life and art, after all, are replete with comparable structures of feeling and form,
and listeners can draw on such experiences (in their lives, in Lutosławski’s life,
symbolized in other artworks, etc.) when reflecting on a musical akcja. An akcja’s
ultimate potential for meaning only stops, therefore, at the lines drawn by an individual’s tastes or experiences. One listener to Lutosławski’s String Quartet might
hear formalist sonic architecture involving p.c. sets and post-tonal pitch centres;
another an abstract drama in which interacting musical ideas symbolize a tragic
struggle for liberty and individuality. At the heart of all these different interpretations, however, one could still locate the same multivalent metaphor structure:
a Lutosławski akcja whose significations can be identified and analysed in their
own right, and which limit, and therefore productively encourage, our freedom to
interpret his music. What results is a type of narrativity found in many musical
repertoires: limited-aleatory narrativity, in which individual perceiver narrativizations relate to the stimulant, pre-narrative text, but not necessarily directly to each
other. The akcja of the String Quartet and many other Lutosławski pieces – and
more generally his concern to create accessible, genuinely involving musical experiences for listeners at home and abroad – might thus be interpreted to concern
liberty on a yet more profound level: at a time when the freedoms of Lutosławski
and his fellow Polish citizens were curtailed in countless ways by the apparatus
and ideology of communism, the acts of the imagination spurred by Lutosławski’s
plots permitted intoxicating experiences of liberation. And they still do today.
meaning in music are, obviously enough, gargantuan in both scope and intensity. Recent treatments which light the way for such an investigation, though, in addition to Klein’s recent book,
include Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Towards a Critical History, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002; Kevin Korsyn, Decentring Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Arved Ashby, ed., The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003; and
Michael Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.