Listening to Lutoslawski: Part Two
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| Lutoslawski looks admiringly toward his orchestra before he enthusiastically begins conducting. |
In 1964, Witold Lutoslawski completed a string quartet commissioned by Swedish Radio for the LaSalle Quartet. He had the music. But there was no score. Not in any form the LaSalle Quartet could read, anyway. A conventional score — four staves aligned vertically, showing what each player does at each moment — would have been, in his own words, false. Misleading. It would have represented a different work entirely.
So what had he given them? The notes each player was to play. The figures, the gestures, the precise melodic content for each instrument. What he could not give them was a document showing how those parts aligned in time, because the alignment was the piece. The four players were to operate independently of each other — their own tempos, their own rhythmic streams — converging at points the conductor would cue and diverging again freely in between. Write that down in a conventional score and you freeze something that was never meant to be frozen. You lie about the music.
Really? A composition without a score? Even John Cage wasn’t doing that. So naturally the world-renowned quartet asked for something. They needed something they could actually hold.
His wife Danuta found the answer. She had been an architecture student before she gave that up to support Lutoslawski’s work entirely. She had spent eighteen years as his copyist, designing his studio, understanding the music from the inside. Now she took the problem and solved it spatially.
She designed a large-format score in which each of the four parts was boxed separately within each “mobile” — her name for the sections, or his, the attribution is uncertain, though the image comes from Calder's hanging sculptures, objects that move independently within a fixed overall structure. The boxes were stacked in standard vertical order but the alignment between them was deliberately broken. No vertical line connected one part to another. The score existed. It just could not be read the way scores are read.
Some of the instructions in that score were not musical at all. "Let the violist know when you finish playing." That is a social instruction. A human one. He was asking four people in a room to listen to each other as people, not as executors of a written text.
How Lutoslawski reached this point is one of the more remarkable stories in twentieth-century music.
There is a body of work at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, various manuscript sketches, private studies, technical explorations, that scholars have called Lutoslawski's “parallel path.” It runs alongside his catalog for roughly twenty-five years, from the late 1950s onward. It was never intended for performance. It is not pieces. It is research — specifically, harmonic research, the private working-out of a twelve-tone system so personal that he later denied being a serialist, even as the evidence of systematic thinking covered page after page in his notebooks.
He disavowed the label because he was right to. He was not following the great Arnold Schoenberg. He was not building tone rows in the Viennese sense. He was doing something more idiosyncratic and innovative: constructing chords and harmonic aggregates from specific interval groups, testing how pitch collections could be rotated and recombined while maintaining a consistent sound world. Dense. Chromatic. But controlled. His mathematician's instinct applied to harmony: no decoration that doesn't do structural work, no excess, everything accountable to the system underneath.
The parallel path is where he figured out that what he was hearing could not be placed on conventional paper. Not yet. Maybe not ever entirely. He wrote it down in his notebook: "I very often view my finished works as poor caricatures of the original concept." That entry is dated April 6, 1961 — the day after he completed the first chaotic draft of what would become Venetian Games, the piece he later called his first mature statement. Even at the moment of breakthrough, the gap between what he heard and what he made was visible to him.
Danuta closed that gap as far as it could be closed, in 1964, with a large-format page and a new way of reading a score. This large format scoring became standard Lutoslawski after this. But let’s back up seven years.
Five Songs for female voice and piano arrive in 1956 and 1957, and this is the first time Lutoslawski sounds like himself. Everything before this — the Concerto for Orchestra, the Symphony No. 1, the folk-inflected pieces — is wonderful music that does not quite sound like what I have known him to be for all these years. He gave us flashes of this before but here the flashes stop being flashes. The harmonic language has changed. He has moved to twelve-tone thinking on his own terms, and the result, remarkably, is music that is not forbidding. It is not academic. It breathes. There is warmth in it even as the harmony has gone somewhere new.
That is not a small achievement. Twelve-tone music earned its reputation for coldness because most composers using the technique treated the row as a constraint before it was a resource. I confess it took me years of listening to Schoenberg to reach a place where I could hear him with minor affection. But I immediately connected with Lutoslawski’s use of the technique.
He treated it as a resource from the start — specifically, as a way to achieve chromatic density without muddiness, richness without tonal center, expressive weight without the clichés of late romanticism he was done with. The Five Songs prove it works. They are the first evidence that the parallel path research was producing something real.
Funeral Music follows in 1958, for string orchestra, written in memory of the great composer Bela Bartók. It is austere and genuinely grief-stricken — twelve ascending half-steps, a structure of enormous compression, the orchestra pulled into a single relentless arc. It is one of his most performed works now and deservedly so. Where Five Songs showed warmth within the new language, Funeral Music shows its capacity for severity in a more traditional manner. He is not trapped in a style. He is building one.
The Three Postludes, a symphonic cycle running from 1958 into 1963, are worth singling out here even though they straddle what comes next. This is the basic Lutoslawski sound beginning to cohere at orchestral scale. Short, juxtaposed sound modules. Figures that can sit alongside each other without tangling. Something still constrained by conventional bar divisions but already pressing against them, already feeling the edges of what coordinated ensemble playing allows. He is building toward a problem he hasn't quite named yet.
Charles Bodman Rae wrote The Music of Lutoslawski through multiple editions. In 1999 he provided technical insight for what the composer was attempting: “Postlude No. 2 provides plenty of evidence to demonstrate that Lutoslawski was searching for means of achieving harmonic blurring, particularly in the melodic lines. […] Instead of forming coordinated unison lines, the polyphonic parts are composed in order to be slightly astray. This effect was soon to be established as one of the most important characteristics of Lutoslawski’s technique of ‘controlled aleatory counterpoint’, and he later used the term ‘bundles’ to describe such disaligned polyphony.” (page 73)
Then on a Polish radio broadcast in 1960, he heard John Cage's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. "Those minutes were to change my life decisively," he said. "I suddenly realized that I could compose music differently from that of my past."
He was forty-seven years old. He had been working on the same set of compositional problems for a decade. And Cage, whose entire philosophy was nearly the opposite of his, who believed chance should govern structure and form, who would have found Lutoslawski's need for control baffling, gave him the answer.
Not Cage's answer. His own answer, inspired by Cage. What he took from that broadcast was narrow and specific: the idea that orchestral players could operate in independent rhythmic streams simultaneously, without a conductor synchronizing them beat by beat. That was all. The layers. The independence. The thing he had been hearing in flashes since the Concerto for Orchestra and couldn't reach by conventional means.
Venetian Games — Jeux Vénitiens — arrives in 1961, and he called it his first mature statement. This is where the aleatory technique debuts, where independent rhythmic layers first operate at full orchestral scale. The conductor cues the beginnings and ends of sections. In between, the players are free — following their own lines inside defined harmonic and melodic boundaries. The overall form and harmonic world are his, completely controlled. The moment-to-moment rhythmic coincidences are not. What emerges is a flickering, layered surface, alive because different parts of it are moving at slightly different rates. He had been hearing this for years. Here it finally exists on paper and in air.
Trois Poèmes d'Henri Michaux, completed in 1963, pushes the technique into choral and orchestral territory simultaneously. Setting a French surrealist poet, working with forces that include a large chorus treated almost percussively at times, he is expanding the vocabulary in every direction. Paroles Tissées follows in 1965, for tenor and chamber orchestra — more intimate, more exposed, the technique no longer needing to announce itself.
Which brings us back to 1964 and the String Quartet.
You now understand what that score problem actually was. It was not a notation inconvenience. It was the logical endpoint of everything the parallel path had been building toward. The music required four independent rhythmic consciousnesses operating simultaneously in the same room. A conventional score synchronizes. Synchronizing this music would have destroyed it. The notation problem was the music's problem made visible.
Danuta's solution — the boxed parts, the broken vertical axis, the instructions that read like social directions — was not a workaround. It was a new architecture for a new kind of music. Built by the woman who had been inside the work long enough to understand what it needed.
Lutoslawski finally arrived at the sonic space he wanted, atmospheric and controlled yet varied and, at times, individualized. Now he would express and explore this sonic wonderland he had created for the world through his distinctive music.
In 1967 Symphony No. 2 featured the aleatory technique at the largest possible scale. Two movements: the first hesitant, exploratory, building toward something it keeps deferring; the second direct, the accumulated energy finally released. The orchestra as a single enormous instrument with independent internal voices. He actually wasn’t trying to compose a symphony but when he finished the two movements he didn’t know what else to call it. "Concerto" really didn’t fit, it was too episodic for that.
This is what the decade of private research and public breakthrough was building toward. It is massive and strange and completely his. He did not intend it as symphony but didn’t know what else to call it. It is fascinating but definitely more exploration than achievement. As I mentioned in Part One, compare it with the Symphony No. 1 for artistic calibration. I found work especially fascinating listening to it again after several years. It is an excellent piece.
Livre pour orchestre in 1968 is a breakthrough of a different kind — looser in formal design, organized in chapters that feel almost improvisatory even as everything is controlled. More movement between states, more air in the system. Where the Second Symphony feels like a culmination, Livre feels like a door opening. He is not consolidating. He is finding new rooms.
The Cello Concerto of 1970, written for the world’s greatest cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, is the most immediately dramatic piece in this whole period. The opening is a long unaccompanied cello solo. Exposed, personal, offered as a prologue to what follows. The orchestra enters not as accompanist but as something more like a crowd, sometimes supportive, sometimes hostile, the soloist navigating through it. The orchestration is, by his standards, relatively traditional. A modern piece but not a radical one in terms of instrumental deployment. The drama comes from the relationship between the single voice and the mass. Rostropovich understood this immediately. So will you.
The Preludes and Fugue of 1972, for thirteen solo strings, steps back to chamber forces. The fugue an extraordinary, genuine engagement with counterpoint on his terms, multiple independent lines finding each other and separating. Everything the String Quartet discovered, now applied to a larger ensemble but still intimate in character. You will see Lutslawski conducting himself in the above video.
Les espaces du sommeil (The Spaces of Sleep) arrives in 1975, setting poems by the French surrealist Robert Desnos, for baritone and orchestra. Night. Dreams. The beloved absent. Desnos wrote these poems in the 1920s with the peculiar clarity of surrealist love poetry, and Lutoslawski sets them with a luminosity that is unlike anything else in his catalog. This is where the technique becomes transparent — you stop hearing the system and hear only the music. The orchestra moves in its independent layers but the effect is not complex. It is close to simple. A man and the spaces his sleeping mind inhabits. One of his most beautiful pieces, and among the most accessible of the mature works. This is the height of all his vocal works.
Mi-Parti for orchestra, 1976, is another breakthrough piece. The title is divided in two, and the orchestra literally split into two groups that begin from opposite poles and move toward each other across the piece. The structure is the drama. By the time the two halves converge, the piece has done something that could not have been conceived within any earlier formal model. You can hear him revealing his unique sonic structure as it unfolds.
The Novelette of 1979 and the Epitaph from the same year are shorter works, more concentrated. At about 18-minutes, I enjoy Novelette for a quick Lutoslawski "fix" sometimes. The Epitaph for oboe and piano has a stillness to it, almost valedictory, though he was nowhere near done. The Double Concerto of 1980, for oboe, harp, and chamber orchestra, is more straightforward in character than much of what surrounds it — the two soloists treated with a kind of classical clarity, the chamber forces balanced against them with precision. It is not one of the pieces that announces itself as revolutionary.
The Paganini Variations were originally written as a piano duet in the Warsaw cafés during the occupation (see Part One). One of the handful of pieces that survived the destruction of the city. Here they are presented in orchestral form. There is something moving about their presence in this sequence. The young man who played this with Panufnik to earn bread in occupied Warsaw is now one of the major composers of the century, and the piece that kept them alive has been dressed in his mature orchestral language. The spirit of the thing is unchanged. It was always lighter than everything around it. It still is.
Grave: Metamorphosis for cello and piano was completed in 1981. Grave for cello and string orchestra followed in 1982. It is a memorial piece, written in response to the declaration of martial law in Poland, the crushing of Solidarity, the end of that brief opening. He did not write protest music. He wrote grief. The cello carries it alone at first, the string orchestra entering gradually, surrounding it without overwhelming it. It is restrained in a way that makes the weight more rather than less. He had been five years old when his father was executed by the Bolsheviks. He knew how this worked. He had known his whole life.
What this period has been, from Five Songs through Grave, is a man discovering the full dimensions of a room he had been feeling his way around in the dark for years. The twelve-tone harmonic language gave him the pitch world. The aleatory technique gave him the rhythmic world. Danuta gave him the means of expressing it in sheet music. And the music that came out of all three. From the Second Symphony's vast aleatory canvas to the intimate grief of Grave, from the luminosity of Les espaces to the structural drama of Mi-Parti, this is the work of a composer who finally, completely, had the innovative language equal to what he actually wanted to say.
He was still fishing for souls. Now he had the right net.
(to be continued)
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