Witold Lutosławski – Livre Pour Orchestre (1968)

I know a handful of Lutosławski pieces from the 80s — the Partita (1984/1988) in particular was a favorite of mine many years ago — but until now, I hadn’t heard any of his earlier work except the String Quartet (1964), which always struck me as more of a high-concept experiment in indeterminacy (“What if there were parts but no score, and the players were instructed not to synchronize with each other?”) than a really satisfying work of art.  By the time he wrote Livre, though, Lutosławski had already gotten interested in the idea of combining indeterminate and strictly notated sections within a single work.  The first half of the piece is divided into sections called “chapters,” which are mostly notated and metrical, and sections called “interludes,” which are little patches of unmetered fiddling around.  In the second half, the two section types blend together:  the third interlude builds to an enormous wall of sound, which then leads into a final chapter that incorporates both metered and unmetered elements.  The climax of the piece is an early instance of the use of loud, percussive attacks to “change channels” between different types of material or (in this case) instrumental groups — a technique I associate more than anything else with Guus Janssen’s Verstelwerk (1996), though I think it also appears in Corigliano’s Circus Maximus (2004), and Berio did an electronic version of it even before Lutosławski in Laborintus 2 (1965).  These percussive attacks get closer and closer together until the material between them disappears entirely, and once they’re right up against each other, they wind up forming a loud, pounding melody.  It actually sounds surprisingly like something Andriessen would have done in the late 70s or early 80s, although he would have ended the pounding melody on three repetitions of the same chord separated by pauses, rather than three different chords separated by pauses.

I’m not sure what Lutosławski was getting at by calling the piece “Book” and its sections “chapters,” since the way it flows doesn’t feel particularly narrative to me.  I guess he might have been trying to attach a sense of weight or seriousness to the piece, since the CD liner notes quote him as saying that the interludes are made of “scarcely significant musical material,” and exist mainly to give the audience a chance to cough or change position between sections with more “substance.”  (A strange idea, I think, since the interludes don’t sound all that different from the rest of the piece.)  But it’s hard to imagine Lutosławski thinking of the piece as difficult listening.  It’s far more accessible than a lot of European music from the 60s, full of huge, theatrical gestures:  swooping string glissandi, violent interruptions, bursts of unpitched percussion and low brass, slabs of micropolyphony.  It’s also got a surprising amount of diatonicism hidden in the midst of its dense textures — the most striking moment being the opening of Chapter 2, in which a Boulezishly shiny collection of instruments (piano, harp, celesta, vibraphone, bells) plays almost inaudible polyrhythmic figures that sound surprisingly like Debussy’s piano music, superimposed on an even quieter bed of pizzicato strings.  Actually, I can sense Debussy’s ghost hovering over other parts of the piece too, particularly the ending, in which two flutes play melodies that coil in on themselves (Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” (1894)) over slow, cycling string chords (Nocturnes (1899)).  Not an influence I was expecting to find here!

One final note:  it’s fascinating to look at the score for this piece and see the worldview and aesthetics of the era reflected in its graphic design.  It’s a cutout score, so the music often seems to be floating in a sea of white space.  Lutosławski was also a fan of the conceptually appealing but practically obnoxious idea of having accidentals apply only to the notes that immediately follow them.  This is clearly the product of an era when composers were utopians, with great faith in musicians’ willingness to abandon tradition and strike out into the exciting unknown future.  But then again, maybe I’m overstating my case:  Lutosławski did have a pragmatic side too, and included courtesy accidentals in the individual parts.