Witold Lutosławski
Born January 25, 1913, Warsaw, Poland.
Died February 7, 1994, Warsaw, Poland.
Chain 2: Dialogue for Violin and Orchestra
In 1960, Witold Lutosławski happened to hear part of a radio broadcast of John Cage's Piano Concerto, a work that leaves much to chance and is, therefore, different at every performance. Lutoslawski later said that “those few minutes were to change my life decisively. It was a strange moment . . . I suddenly realized that I could compose music differently from that of my past.”
Lutosławski did not become a Cage disciple and his subsequent scores sound nothing like Cage's works. “Composers often do not hear the music that is being played,” he said later, recalling the ways that listening to Cage that day changed him.
It only serves as an impulse for something quite different—for the creation of music that only lives in their imagination. It is a sort of schizophrenia—we are listening to something and at the same time creating something else.
Lutosławski had started composing shortly after he began to study piano as a boy. His idols then were those of father: Beethoven and Chopin. He later became “intoxicated” by Scriabin and by Szymanowki's Third Symphony, the most “modern” music he would hear for many years in restrictive Communist Poland. When his own First Symphony of 1947 was banned as “formalist,” he turned to writing music based on Polish folk material, culminating in the still popular Concerto for Orchestra of 1954 that was a homage to Bartók. As he later said, “I wrote as I was able, since I could not yet write as I wished.” His dismissive attitude recalls Bartók, long one of his musical heroes, who kept reassigning opus numbers to his scores, each time excluding the earliest works that no longer pleased him.
After discovering Cage's music, Lutosławski began to introduce the idea of chance—through freely notated, “improvisational” passages—into his developing personal language. The Venetian Games of 1961 was the breakthrough piece, and it made Lutosławski a leader of the avant-garde from which he had once been excluded. His major works of the next decades— including his 1983 masterpiece, the Third Symphony written for the Chicago Symphony—all benefited from the use of various kind of ad lib music alternating with conventionally notated passages. As Lutosławski wrote,
There is no improvisation in my music. Everything that is to be played is notated in full detail and must be precisely realized by the performers. The sole, though basic, difference between the ad libitum (nonconducted) sections and sections noted in the traditional manner (divided into bars of designated meter) stems from the fact that in the former case, there is no overall scheme of subdividing time to guide the various players. In other words, each plays his part as if he were playing alone and does not coordinate with the other performers. The result is a distinctly “elastic” synthesis of complex, capricious rhythms, which cannot be produced by any other method.
As Lutosławski admitted, such freedom for the performers, even in playing elaborate and demanding material, “restores a pleasure of music making which was neglected when music got very complicated.”
In the mid-1980s, after the success of the Third Symphony, Lutosławski wrote three independent works he called Chain, after the overlapping forms of their design. (The first, for chamber ensemble, dates from 1983; both the second, for violin and orchestra, which is performed at these concerts, and the third, for large orchestra, were premiered in 1986.) “Over the last few years I have been working on a new type of musical form,” the composer explained,
which consists of two structurally independent strands. Sections within each strand begin and end at different times. This is the premise on which the term “Chain” was selected.
Chain 2, for solo violin and orchestra, has four movements, alternately ad libitum and a battuta (with the beat)—that is, switching back and forth between the free and the strictly conducted kinds of music that define the mature Lutosławski style. In the ad libitum sections, the conductor presides over the written “improvisations” of the various instruments without dictating the way they unfold: “Any coordination is undesirable,” Lutosławski writes in the score. The last movement is itself a microcosm of the whole, beginning and ending a battuta, but with a short, “elastic” ad libitum section in the middle.
Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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