The Enigma of Lustoslawski Livre Pour Orchestre

Livre or Symphony?
Lutosawski's Livre pour orchestre and the Enigma of Musical

Narrativity
Author(s): NICHOLAS REYLAND
Source: Music Analysis, Vol. 27, No. 2/3 (July-October 2008), pp. 253-294
Published by: Wiley
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DOI: 10.HH/j.1468-2249.2009.00276.x
NICHOLAS REYLAND
Livre or Symphony? Lutoslawski's Livre pour orchestre and

the Enigma of Musical Narrativity
Enigma: a Composer Changes His Mind

On 29 May 1968 Witold Lutoslawski typed a letter to Berthold Lehmann,
Generalmusikdirektor of the Hagen Stdtisches Orchester. Addressing the con-
ductor in German, the composer discussed various minor practical matters
relating to the parts and score of his soon-to-be-completed commission from
Hagen, Livre pour orchestre, which had been scheduled for its first performance
later that year as part of the Hagener Musiktage. Towards the end of his letter,
however, Lutoslawski broached a subject of considerably greater significance: the
question of Livre pour orchestres title. The composer, it appears, had begun to
change his mind.
The title was part of the composer's original plan for the piece, devised shortly
after Lehmann had first approached him regarding a commission in 1962. As
Lutoslawski later explained, it had been his intention to compose 'a loosely
connected group of movements ... a cycle of composition [s] of different lengths
ending with a long finale'.1 Yet he had initially envisaged not the work's eventual
four chapitres separated by three short intermdes, but rather a collection of
orchestral miniatures, each exploiting different hues of the ensemble and inter-
spersed with interludes; a slightly longer final chapitre would act as a rhetorical
gesture of closure. That plan had suggested, in turn, the concept of a livre pour
orchestre. Lutoslawski reported that Lehmann had 'seized at the title and idea
with alacrity'.2
In an interview conducted at the time of the work's Polish premiere at the
1969 Warsaw Autumn, Lutoslawski gave a more precise explanation of why he
had decided to call his cycle of pieces a livre. The origins of the title, he claimed,
lay in the past. 'Couperin's Livre de clavecin and Bach's Orgelbchlein', he told
interviewer Tadeusz Kaczynski, 'were both collections of compositions of various
lengths and forms'.3 Yet the nature of the work had evidently been in a state of
flux. 'When I finished it', he subsequently reported, 'it was much too organized,
against my will, and the title no longer corresponded to the character of the
piece';4 instead of maintaining their independence, 'une certaine logique, une
certaine action' among the chapitres had emerged.5 In the 1969 interview he
described elements of this emergence in more detail, employing striking terms.
The chapitres and intermdes, he said, had become 'links in the development of a
single event .... I feel that the construction of closed forms involves the presence
Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 253

2009 The Author.
Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA
254 NICHOLAS REYLAND
of contrasting elements, that is to

centrifugal force, and their subsequen
force. Only then is a composition likel
His initial inclination in favor of a c
problematised, it appears, by the co
narrative - what Lutoslawski terme
English, 'plot') and deemed all subst
significance such as the symphony, h
some musical events that together - o
action, to a plot of a drama, or a no
action] is important for all those w
form'.7
The discussion of the piece's title in Lutoslawski's letter to Lehmann confirms
this change of direction,8 and at the same time reveals creative and expressive
tensions at the heart of this 'masterpiece of the modern orchestral repertoire'.9 In
his revelatory closing paragraph, the composer writes:
Finally, I would like to add a few more words about the title of the piece, as I find
that the title 'Livre pour orchestre' sounds a little pretentious and does not quite
correspond to the work's form. As you will no doubt recall, my initial intention
was to write a series of small pieces. In which case the suggested title would have
been a fitting one, but in its current state my work is much closer to a large closed
form. That is why it is necessary to find a new title. Please allow me a little extra
time to get a definitive title to you (possibly simply Third Symphony).10
By the time this communication had arrived in Hagen, however, the first per-
formance of Livre pour orchestre had been announced for 18 November 1968. To
change the title to Symphony No. 3 was therefore impractical, and Lutoslawski
later allowed his composition to be published with the title under which it was
premiered. However, the fact that Lutoslawski often mentioned this letter in later
years suggests that, although its alternative title was never publicly revealed,11 he
remained ambivalent about the validity of the designation of the work as a 'book
for orchestra'. Analysts approaching the piece might therefore begin by asking a
superficially simple question: is this work a livre, that is, made up of independent
components, or a symphony, which implies some kind of longer-range musical
narrative? Much of what follows addresses this important but as yet unanswered
question.12 Other considerations immediately suggest themselves, however,
thickening the analytical plot. How, for instance, might one enlist the conflicted
theoretical literature on music and narrative in the task of analysing this piece
with 'une certaine action'? And what questions might such an endeavour raise
about the complex matter of musical narrativity?
Catalysing Section: Speaking (Circumspectly) of Musical Narrative

The quest to read music as some kind of narrative, notes Joseph Kerman, is 'one
of music criticism's most persistent and persistently controversial projects'.13
2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
the Enigma of Musical Narrativity 255
During the last twenty years, however, this m

re-emerged as a site of notably active disputati
stand those who would probably agree with Roman
instrumental Western art music, like many other
the semiotic potential to communicate aspects of a
It is evident that many devices ... are not confined to ver

possibility of transposing Wuthering Heights into a
legends into frescoes and miniatures, or L'aprs-midi d'u
and graphic art. However ludicrous may appear the ide
in comics, certain structural features of their plot ar
disappearance of their verbal shape.14
On the other side, however, stand perhaps many m

Jean-Jacques Nattiez and consider 'the notion of m
tion as just another metaphor to which human lan
has to resort in order to attempt to define the speci
in time'.15
Both sides of the debate - the more familiar aspects of which have been
summarised in a number of recent publications16 - made their voices heard in a
2006 AMS-List discussion of music and narrative.17 Numerous contributions to
that thread read like a weary re-treading of well-rutted pathways.Yet the discourse
was distinguished by a number of posts focussing on the experiences of compos-
ers who have, in one way or another, used narrative-related ideas in their creative
work.18 A vacuum in the music-and-narrative literature could usefully be filled,
those contributions implied, by the testimony of creative musicians, in order to
provide a poietic counterpoint to the theoretical esthesics of musical narrativity
(or against musical narrativity) proposed elsewhere.19 Anecdotal evidence sug-
gests that much recent music, for instance, has been created - and by composers
as aesthetically divergent as Brian Ferneyhough and Judith Weir - with the
intention of making music which draws on conventions of narrative, yet which
remains distinct from more literal attempts at musical diegesis or mimesis of the
kinds that have been rightly problematised by the musical narrativity debate's
stress on the inability of music literally to narrate diegetically or to present
mimetically the concrete components of a story.20 Musical narratives need not,
such testimony hints, be attempts to tell extramusical stories through purely
musical means; however, some compositional traditions may require a more
pragmatic approach to the location and interpretation of musical narrativity.
It may prove possible to relate some of the most pertinent issues to the more
circumspect claims of a number of music theorists who have exhibited a diligent
interest in the topic which has outlasted the engagements en passant of some
scholars in the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s.21 For instance, rather than
proposing the existence of all-encompassing systems of musical-narrative signi-
fication capable of explicitly representing or telling a literary or otherwise con-
cretely signified story, Gregory Karl has argued forcefully that 'no major
Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publish
advocate of musical narratology actu

traditional sense' (subtexts variously e
Newcomb and Joseph Kerman).22 A m
do with narrative' in the sense of a d
through either mimetic or diegetic m
term narrative is thus a somewhat 'mi
sense of teleology', or in other word
musical narrativity, in this sense, the
some composers seek to make good on
Jonathan Kramer's words, One event
in music'.24 Listening to a musical dis
along such lines is also one means b
perhaps many other listeners seek to
in terms of sequences of cause and e
whole expressed by (or at least open
of musical events (although there are
more below).
The similarity of this somewhat circ
Nattiez's ostensibly dismissive, but act
- often trotted out, misleadingly, as t
music as any kind of narrative - is
hitherto been misconstrued (even, p
specialists).25 Nattiez notes that rea
'serious risk of slipping from narrati
belief that, 'since music suggests narra
are the key. It may be beyond the sem
represent a concrete story, but there
strong-arming required to translate t
music into a literal narrative (then to
reading's transcendent validity) and
required to experience any evocation
idea that one event leads to another, s
of music can therefore sculpt one's pe
development and logic, within closed
beginnings, middles and ends. Moreo
discourse, from the most semiotically
input on the part of its perceivers
broadcast, a conversation, an e-mail
thing being told. A narrative, in Natt
a story, but also an act' and becaus
music in a more or less spontaneous
rise to 'the "narrative impulse" '27
It follows that musical elements w
genres of metamorphosing topics, c
2009 The Author. Music Analysis^ 27/ii-iii (2008)

shifts in the power relationship between soloists a

actions of themes and tonal areas, and so on28
potential loci for experiences of musical narrati
literature amply demonstrates how one can identif
musical discourses without indulging in the kin
narrativisations that seek to locate all of the signif
musical discourse. Alan Street aptly describes exces
of ventriloquism: a manipulation of the figure o
jumping the abysmal gap between word and w
speaking of music and narrative, to go too far (or a
And as Maus points out, the music-and-narrative
figured 'the need for care in articulating claims ab
debate 'did not prove5, however, 'that analogies be
useless5.30 Musical narrativisations - notably stron
multivalent metaphor structure consisting of mus
at least gathered into some kind of associative n
acts.31 But it is also too easy to take the pitfalls of
avoid investigating the gap between word and w
close to suggesting as much) . And that is a proble
appears to be terrain explored aplenty by compose
Lutoslawski5s personal conception of musical plot
cratic synthesis of Aristotelian dramatic theory, re
theatre, his teacher Witold Maliszewski5s conceptio
experience, analyses of works by Beethoven and a
signification and lack of consequence he heard (or
most innovative styles - reveals a composer eage
impulse.32 His poetics of musical akcja, as dedu
lectures and writings,33 appears to have rested on
linked notions of 'key ideas5 and a distinction b
events. In a 1962 lecture, 'Problems of Musical F
that, 'in the case of the classics5, a 'key idea5 was pr
'clothed in its own characteristic harmony5 and w
main idea of the whole work5; it thus determin
nomy5. He then explained how thematic ideas m
tonal contemporary music, arguing that, although i
melodically, a 'key idea5 could manifest itself as
object55 or, to put it differently, an independent
time5. Such post-tonal objets sonores, he claime
mining 'the cast of the whole work just as themes do in classical music5. In
his description of the musical parameters which determined the nature of
sound objects, Lutoslawski placed a particular stress on the role of pitch
organisation.
Key ideas therefore represented Lutoslawski5s attempt to create substitutes
within his mature post-tonal idiom for the pitch classes, motives, themes and

harmonies capable of bearing the deve

classical-romantic musical plots. 'As fa
Isaw that the main weak point of modern

of theme (or even motif) [had been] disc
motif is highly effective: its impact on
find some sort of substitute for conventio
of a small number of notes).34
What, then, are the 'radioactive' co

which define a key idea? Lutoslawski's
organisation was the creation of what
limited interval-class structures (som
fested in his music as lines, simultane
only two or three different types of
zontal and/or vertical pitches. The '
distinctive qualities thus appears to
questions of 'quality' to be answere
instance, local presentations of key id
shifts in quality through an unstab
interval-class qualities might imply a
late one quality while implying anothe
contrasted qualities (embodied, perh
inaugurated. The working through of
musical akcja, motivating much of a L
and structural power.35
The initial presentation of key ide
investigate their 'radioactive' implicat
same 1962 lecture, during a compos
Such moments form chains of what Lutoslawski termed 'static' events; those
chains of events, and the directed process of development they embody, signify
the major turning points in a musical plot. More bluntly, these chains' working
through of a key idea and its implications are the plot, the akcja, of a composition,
and to perceive the plot of a Lutoslawski musical narrative is (at least in part) to
hear and recognise those relationships. (Note that the term 'static' should not be
taken literally as either a musical or a cognitive description: Lutoslawski uses it
impressionistically to indicate a listener's absorption in (and of) the implications
of a 'moment of intense significance' for a developing akcja.36)The all-important
static events, in turn, are introduced, linked and framed by 'dynamic' events.
(Lutoslawski's use of this term is similarly idiosyncratic and indicates an imag-
ined perceiver's anticipation of the next crucial instalment in the musical plot.)
In dynamic events, variations of ideas previously presented in static events can be
expected to shape, through a variety of means, the listener's anticipation of
arrival (by sending one's imagination 'dynamically' forwards) at the next
'moment of intense significance', in other words, the next syntactically important

development in the plot-like chain of static events

piece's key ideas.37
The following analysis utilises Lutoslawski's co
plot to interpret Livre pour orchestre. That proto-t
is reinforced with reference to what may turn ou
debate concerning musical narrative, to illumin
between the notions of a composer steeped in th
and other work on music and plot inspired by Rola
the nature of narrative: his essay 'Introduction
Narratives' (1966) and book-length study SIZ (1
adopts terminology from Barthes's 'Introduction' e
Not only is the former a more elegant fit with asp
than are the codes SIZ (and thus a hopefully pro
adaptations of SIZ discussed below), but its aims
at least arguably, with analyses of musical plot. In
methodological dissonance between Barthes's 'wr
seeks to open the content and meanings of a text t
narratives) and the way in which that book's proje
to somewhat more formalist 'readerly' projects in
For Barthes, a narrative's story is not passively p
is an act of passionate reconstruction (and even dec
argues in SIZ). To understand a narrative, Barthes wrote in his 'Introduction'
essay, 'is not merely to follow the unfolding of the story, it is also to recognize its
construction in "storeys", to project the horizontal concatenations of the narra-
tive "thread" on to an implicitly vertical axis; to read ... a narrative is not merely
to move from one word to the next, it is also to move from one level to the next'.40
Barthes's 'narrative "thread" ' - his term for a plot - therefore involves the reader
in emplotting and then interpreting, within a suitable framework of cultural
conventions, a chain of connected but not necessarily uninterruptedly consecu-
tive events in response to a text's discourse. Barthes refers to plots as 'functional
sequences', made up of 'functional units' and padded out by 'expansion' or
'catalysing' units. The structuring of a plot, he writes, 'is essentially characterized
by two powers: that of distending its [functional] signs over the length of the
[text] and that of inserting unforeseeable [catalysing] expansions into these
distortions'.41
For an event in a plot to be functional, Barthes explains, it must 'inaugurate
or conclude [or, he says elsewhere, temporarily sustain] an uncertainty'.42 A plot
must therefore be inaugurated by an enigma: a question, problem or ambiguity
to be developed and resolved by ensuing functional events (what will that gun be
used for? why do these people own a parrot?).43 It may be some time, however,
before a perceiver discovers the full implications of any enigma. Consequently,
the elasticated gap between the initiation and closure of a functional sequence,
by catalysing the principal units of the narrative thread and thereby manipulating
a perceiver's expectation of resolution, creates what Barthes calls 'suspense'. The

units of a functional sequence are p

catalysing expansion units; perceivers
vention to seek an enigma-resolving e
lising unease until the final functiona
predicate completing a sentence, or a
As the elastic stretches, tension rises,
intelligibility ... "suspense" accomplish
the most pathetic is also the most i
"mind", not in the "guts" '44
Several obvious points of contact b
Lutoslawski's poetics of akcja can im
between Barthes's idea that plots divi
Lutoslawski's notion of static events a
Barthes's 'veritable "thrilling" of intelligibility' may similarly remind one of
Lutoslawski's statements about playing with the 'active' listener's expectations
and shaping a large-scale closed form as a psychological experience. Part of the
thrill of emplotting an akcja's moments of 'intense musical significance' could
also relate to the enigmatic implications of one or more key ideas. If so, reading
such music through Barthes's more widely tested and robust terminology - for
instance viewing a key idea as a plot enigma whose question of quality inaugurates
a functional sequence of static events seeking a solution to that problem - begins
to suggest a theoretically engaged tool kit for analysing Lutoslawski's music.
Similar tools have been developed from Barthes and tested elsewhere by
music analysts. Patrick McCreless's and John Novak's extensions of S/Z*s codes
for the analysis of narrative (the codes remix the terms discussed in Barthes's
'Introduction' essay) 'star' pieces of music into smaller segments to slow down
their readings, then analytically process each event via the filter-like codes.45
Barthes's proairetic code is thus adapted to relate to the basic functional and
catalysing events in a piece of music. McCreless, for instance, links the proairetic
to the contrapuntal-harmonic structure plotted by a Schenkerian graph (sug-
gesting that voice-leading events form a ready-made starring of a musical text) .
He then traces what SIZ calls 'hermeneutic' enigmas and developments onto the
graph's proairetic sequences - the enigmas he identifies relating to chromatic
problems presented early in a composition and developed over the course of a
piece at a variety of structural levels.
The enigma that McCreless locates in the first movement of Beethoven's
'Ghost' Trio, Op. 70, for instance, is the stress placed on the pitch F at the start
of the piece. The pitch jars in the context of D major, the composition's tonal
centre. Discussing McCreless's work, Novak usefully summarises the hermeneu-
tic (that is, functional) sequence which sustains and eventually resolves that
enigma:
The principal hermeneutic issue is the recurrence of the pitch F and its resolu-
tion: this note recurs throughout the piece, sometimes resolving down to E, other

times resolving up to Ft. Part of the development se

F ... whose reference to the opening 'enigmatic' F is ac
of the motive and texture of the piece's opening. Th
during the recapitulation in a lengthy F major passage.
The music can thus close securely in D major, ha

sequence's point of predication by resolving the en
F. Novak identifies a similar enigma (FV in the cont
hermeneutic destiny of Janacek's The Fiddler's Chi
These analyses help hone an understanding of t
musical enigmas and functional sequences in Lutosl
a wider repertoire of music. First, the enigma is a
be heard as an issue to be resolved, interrogated
context of a particular composition's stylistic frame
in a functional/hermeneutic sequence will on occas
only to issues arising from the enigmatic problem
elements (texture and motive in the case of the 'G
key functional events (both Novak and McCrele
Barthes's 'semic' code in order to trace recurring t
commitment to expanding McCreless's applicatio
ratological analysis into early twentieth-century mu
adapting such theories to post-tonal applications, a
bility with later twentieth-century music (such
organisational contrasts remain marked enough
difference, consonance and dissonance, cause and e
with relative clarity.47
Bearing in mind the links that can be made between Lutoslawski's and
Barthes's ideas, the supportive context of existing music-analytical adaptations of
Barthes's theories of narrative and the potentially wider-ranging links between
such work and debates surrounding the constitution of musical narrativity, I will
seek to offer a pragmatic and theoretically engaged adaptation of Lutoslawski's
poetics of musical plot to a close reading of Livre pour orchestre - the voices of
composers having made an as yet little-heard contribution to this area of technical
discourse. The analysis adopts this framework in response to a fascinating com-
position which itself raises issues of musical narrativity: this is a piece in which a
classicist conception of symphonic plot vies with what turns out to be a modernist
alternative, manipulating and ultimately reversing listener expectations.
What may be of wider interest here to analysts and theorists not directly
engaged with issues of musical narrativity (or with Lutoslawski's music, for that
matter) is the possibility that such work could begin to feel somewhat similar, on
reflection, to a good deal of other analytical activity. Is that because this approach
offers a way to formalise intuitions which underwrite the key tropes of, say,
traditional symphonic or thematic analysis? Once one has worked on music and
narrative, one begins to sense a veiled reliance on narratological principles
(disguised via code words such as 'symphonic', 'logic' and 'musical thought')

Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishin
lurking within a multitude of attemp

(and in some cases more intensely su
response to individual compositions -
place yet theoretically ungrounded us
music criticism. That a narrative-orie
analysis of works beyond the Lutos
course, by McCreless's and Novak's wo
literature. A more sustained apprai
investigation, is thus required of the p
understanding, say, the bipartite clas
the question of what makes a sympho
ask whether the apparent ease with
symphonic, thematic or even Schen
about claims lodged against traditiona
modern theory. Are narrative approa
offer a tool with which one might
isolating and codifying a linear plot o
when one then illustrates said plot wi
in Ex. 10 below - comes perilously c
a piece as an unchanging and unchan
doing so seem clear at this moment
stood to be asserted rather than disco
and when 'the analyst is more incline
writing down of interpretations fr
becomes 'a focus on self-awareness' as much as a focus on musical works.49 One
reason music is never just 'the music itself is because musical works, like literary
narratives, are also perceptual acts.
Narratives, however, are not static unities: narratives are all about change.
Their fundamental tenet is disunity over time. Stories, Jonathan Culler has
argued, are humanity's pervasive mode of knowing and understanding change,
whether we are 'thinking of our lives as a progression leading somewhere' or
investing the sound of a clock's tick-tock (in Frank Kermode's famous example)
with a sense of plot-like causality.50 Moreover, stories - the plots told by narra-
tives - do not exist outside of individual attempts to perceive and, in turn, relate
aspects of the experience of change; those tellings (which are acts of criticism,
whether formal or informal) in turn become further narrative discourses. Dia-
grams of plots are fraudulent or, better, fictional, in the sense that a photofit of
a crook is fictional: it is not the crook's actual photograph, still less the flesh-
and-blood crook. Yet such fictions may prove useful in alerting other people to a
phenomenon's salient features, at least as perceived by an individual witness.
One might help to catch a criminal, or even something salient about a piece of
music.
If analysing for the plot of a composition is not merely a way of identifying
a fictional photofit of static unity in order to facilitate, say, a reverie of disin-

terested reflection (although this may still be r

therefore be because such discussions offer an o
experience of particular processes of musical
however, without entirely traducing the validity o
tional analytical gains? Alastair Williams has argue
that, in place of a stand-off between 'the straw ta
cological] modernism and an overstated postmod
ernism in the sense of an intellectual tradition
ideas as ' "the music itself" ', formalist approac
and a privileging of unity and integration), the
be critically to transform modernist musicological praxis by 'valuing its
achievements and jettisoning its failures' in light of postmodernism's own
illuminations.52
Addressing such matters with any thoroughness, in a narratological context or
otherwise, obviously lies beyond the scope of the present article. Eero Tarasti's
singularly meticulous theorising of musical narrativity, however, may hold a key
to understanding the subtle re-engineering of traditional approaches to analysis
that the narrative turn might encourage. He has made strenuous efforts 'to depict
wie es eigentlich gewesen ist in music - the alternation between Being and Doing,
tension and rest, dissonance and consonance in the broadest sense of these
terms'.53 Tarasti identifies a reflexive relationship between music's sub specie
aeternitatis qualities and the dynamic flux of its experience in time. Indeed, he
notes experiences of musical temporality that present alternatives to serial linear
hearings, such as his proposal for a consideration of 'superimposed, simulta-
neously present levels of musical action' in the opening of Beethoven's
'Waldstein' Piano Sonata, Op. 53.54 Music, one is reminded, can be experienced
in reverse, as disconnected moments, as a mosaic, as a spiral, as a tableau, and
so on. Nonetheless, in the same rhetorical breath, Tarasti asserts that 'music is
basically a linear art of time'.55 Elsewhere he makes clear his view of the dualistic
nature of musical narrative, as developed primarily from his adaptation of the
ideas of A. J. Greimas. Tarasti states that 'the achronic fundamental structure of
music is first spatial at a deeper level', that is, something conceptual to be
'composed out' or, in Tarasti's term, 'generated' by a piece, such as the enigmatic
conflicts posed by a semiotic square's inherent tensions. 'At the next level', he
continues, 'when music starts to get "narrativized", this hierarchic relation is
temporalized'.56 And it is this diachronic temporalisation that one experiences
when one listens to a piece of music and from which, in turn, one might seek to
emplot the coordinates of an achronic concept. This quantum conception of
musical narrativity therefore calls further attention to the intellectual 'suspense'
Barthes identified as being central to the experience of perceiving a plot, which
is not merely a fixed unity to be reconstructed and stored away like a photofit
image in a database of analytical crimes, but also an experience of change to be
shared with other perceivers through a feedback loop of temporal and atemporal
reflection.

It is hoped that speaking of music

relatively circumspect context of the
encourage more sustained and rigor
issues are certainly germane to this ar
pour orchestre (from this narrativising
piece is all about transformative ch
straightforwardly unfolding structur
music analyst must fictionalise it as s
communicative clarity. Rather, it is a
its most astonishing passage, infects t
that rewrites the story entirely, as Lu
its polarity and becomes centripetal,
Functional Sequence: a Narratological Analysis of Livre pour orchestre

Performing a preliminary, Barthes-inspired 'starring' of the first movement of
Livre pour orchestre (Fig. I),57 by segmenting the music into separate events and
thus developing a basic overview of its form, is a relatively straightforward but
productive process.58 The music can be roughly hewn into a three-part ABA
structure: the outer A sections are dominated by quietly gliding string textures,
while the inner section features louder and more robust exchanges between
strings and brass. It is also possible to identify certain events as potential static
instalments in a functional plot sequence. The first five bars and the sustained
chords at rehearsal number 102 are obvious candidates. Other passages, such as
rehearsal number 101 and the return of the pesante string 'theme' at bars 2-4
after rehearsal number 107, are clearly dynamic catalysing sections. What is one
to make, however, of the lento misterioso at rehearsal number 104, in which one
hears an echo of the static chords at rehearsal number 102 within a texture which
is nonetheless continuously changing and thus potentially dynamic?
Seeking through a cursory initial segmentation to determine all of the
chapitre'^ individual passages as either static or dynamic presents an analytical
Fig. 1 First chapitre, structural outline
Al/i A2/i Al/ii A2/ii Al/iii Bl/i B2/i B3 Bl/ii
bs 1-5 bs 6-9 reh. no 102 reh. no 103 reh. no 104 reh. no 104, reh. no 106 reh. no 107, reh. no 107, reh. no 108 reh. no 109
toreh.no b. 8, to b. 1 bs 2-4 to end
101 reh. no 105
J=c. 80 J=c. 120, J=c. 88, Piii mosso / Lento Poco piii J = c. 160, Ad lib. J = c. 160 Lento
Pi mosso Meno mosso Meno mosso misterioso mosso ma Piii mosso
pesante
String Flowing String Flowing String Pesante Brass Ad lib. for Pesante Brass String
chords strings chords strings chords string flourish basses, string flourish chords
'theme' c'bassoon, 'theme' (cont.) and piano
piano, tuba (cont.)
pp mf PP f fr ff f ff
c " 0'22" 0'48" 02" 1'27" 52" 2'20" 2'25" 2'33" 2'38" 2'57" to
c. 42"

challenge bearing a valuable lesson in relation to

instances of musical akcja. As Steven Stucky write
considered an essay in transformation in which te
role:59 'a texture of extraordinarily liquid quality
means of glissando and quarter-tones, a stream
coursing in deeper channels, now rushing ahead, n
sound, now agitated, now tranquil'.60 Texture can
the elements which generate the movement's 'mer
cious changes of direction'.61 The music, consequent
more general, non-Lutoslawskian sense, because its
ing. Indeed, it could almost be considered an es
Barthes's usage, so teasingly does Lutoslawski's con
late one's expectation of its moments of arrival.
Developing a more precise identification of what
specifically Lutoslawskian sense in Livre pour orche
chapitre), and thus the events in its functional
more subtle approach than merely noting obvious
what an individual event contains, in terms of the
it presents or develops, is every bit as crucial to th
tions. A revised segmentation of the first chapitre i
Fig. 2 First chapitre, 'static' and 'dynamic' events
STATICl 1 DYNAMICl I STATIC2 I DYNAMIC2 I STATIC3 I DYNAMIC3

bsl-5 b.6-reh.nol01 Reh. no 102 Reh. nos 103-104 Reh.no 104 bs Reh. no 105
Al/i
String chor
Key ideal: Catalysing Key idea 1:2nd Catalysing Statement of Catalysing

'quality' enigma development of functional unit development of key falling ics 1 + 2 development of
(3 + 5 or 4 + 5?) key ideal (10-note ideal emerges from key ideal
sonorities based string 'theme'
STATIC4 1 DYNAMIC4 I STATIC5 I DYNAMIC5 I STATIC6 I DYNAMIC6

Reh. no 106 bs Reh. no 106 b. 3 Reh. no 107 b. 1 Reh. no 107 bs 2- Reh. no 108 b. Reh. no 109-end
1-2
B2/i (start) B2/i(end)
Brass flourish P
flourish c'bassoon, piano, 'theme' cont/brass brass flourish piano
Key idea 1:3rd - Fragmentary Catalysing Key idea 1:4th Chords based on
functional unit ideas exploring development of key functional unit (9- ics2 + 5
(7-note brass ics 1 , 2 & 5 idea 1 note brass (encapsulating
chord pairing ics chord pairing ics one final chord
4 + 5) 4 + 5) exploring key

Ex. 1 Livre pour orchestre, openings bars
v| p--=== - ppP=
pz==
v, , ,|n P=^PP P=^PP P==^PP PZ=~PP
p=~PP P==^PP P==~PP P=^PP PZ=-PP
v, , p=-w p^pp /=- p>pp
y>/>p p>p JiP P P>PP
To avoid confusion, the

in the following discussio
Fig. 2's more nuanced su
The opening enigma of Li
arcs and diaphanous quar
pitch content of these m
specific to allow one to co
flow 'within the narrow r
to be significant),63 only
textural development. Rae
an additional pitch when
gesture which curls inw
disclosing the minor thir
the already sustained E5,
third E5-D^5 wedge sust
a sonority which, followin
major triad.
Livre pour orchestre is not, of course, a tonal composition in which a tension
between major and minor modes within the piece's first key idea might be
expected to propel the machinations of a musical plot - as is the case, for
example, in the composer's own Dance Preludes (1954), in which the clarinet's
opening major arpeggio in the Allegro molto is immediately followed by a
questioning exchange of minor and major thirds (Qr-B3 G-B and so on), which
in turn conjures an enigmatic ambiguity from the opening modal security.65 Yet

neither is the later orchestral work one in which the diatonic resonance of such
sonorities can be considered entirely incidental-, especially given Lutoslawski's
desire for his qualities to shape harmonic shifts more similar to changes between
major and minor modes than to the movement between tonal areas.66 In this
regard, an element of uncertainty is induced when the third glissando in bar 5
alights on Dk, as opposed to the C sustained by the rising gestures in bars 1-2 and
bars 3-4. The suspended pitches A4 and E5 anchor the sense of alternating
minor- and major-like sonorities in STATIC la and lb, and it is this alternation
which brings another interval class into focus: interval class 4, in the form of the
major third implied by the 'major triad' at the end of bar 5. Both of these triadic
sonorities imply both minor and major thirds-, of course-, but it is the switch from
A4-C5 in STATIC la to A4-Q5/5 in STATIC lb, and thus the enlargement
from interval class 3 to interval class 4 (minor third to major third) 3 that the
tonally acculturated ear is led to hear. The shift can therefore be heard to suggest
a key idea in which the initial 'minor' interval-class pairing 3 + 5 is called into
question by the 'major' interval-class pairing 4 + 5 (Ex. 2a and b).67
What emerges is a question of quality which one might refer to as Livre pour
orchestrs opening enigma-, as articulated by its first static-, and thereby func-
tional, plot event. Will the chapitr 's (or even the entire piece's) principal quality
be the interval-class pairing 3 + 5 or 4 + 5 (and will the dominant quality be
primarily associated with a focus on or on A)? Attempts to resolve this enigma
- which can be summarised as the chromatic 'major-minor' set class [0347]
(Ex. 2c) significant in many other Lutoslawski pieces68 - can be traced as a plot
of static events that emerges as a functional sequence over the course of the first
chapitrs fluid musical discourse. Fig. 2 outlines the first chapitrs plot of events
(and, in so doing, reformulates to some extent the preliminary segmentation of
the movement in Fig. 1); Ex. 3 outlines the sonorities articulated by the music's
functional static events.69
Certain elements summarised in Fig. 2 were anticipated in Fig. l's initial
segmentation, such as the emergence of an important new phase beginning with
Ex. 2 (a) STATIC la and lb
(b) Bars 1-2 and 3-5
j - ~ -,-;" (I) - -f .- 4- >-ifr)

(c) Key intervals and harmonies

Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishi
Ex. 3 First chapitre, functional sequenc
SI S2 S4 S6
n.
^^ ^^ ^ ^
^ ^fe ijfei =j= IT
3/4+5? 4+5 4+5 4+5
(A or E?) (A)
Fig. 3 'Plot' and 'subplot' plot-lines in the first cha
the pesante string theme identified originally

Emplotting the presentation and development of
the chapitre^ static events, however, suggests a
the entire section as a struggle between bra
nascent second key idea - developing from ini
into the interval-class quality 2 + 5 - and the
thereby recognises a crucial distinction betw
sections: the change in quality in the second A section to a focus on the
interval-class pairing 2 + 5, as opposed to permutations of the first key idea.
More generally, it permits one to penetrate the mercurial fascinations of the
piece's surface in order to interpret the transformations of its musical plot - most
notably, a series of attempts to resolve convincingly its opening enigma through
a weighty sonority pairing interval classes 4 + 5 which does not achieve a defini-
tively climactic peroration establishing that quality over its alternative, 3 + 5.70
In this regard, one can hear a story emerging in 'storeys' during the static
events in the chapitre. First, these events 'rise above' (in other words, are deemed
more important than) the dynamic events in the piece's hierarchy of significant
and less significant passages; second, some of the static events might be imagined
to rise higher than the other static events in this hierarchy. A top 'storey' of
functional units relates to developments of the implications of the enigmatic first
key idea; a second, and initially less prominent, 'storey' begins to emerge at the
start of the section, establishing a second thread of events (Fig. 3). One might,
in this regard, think of a plot and a subplot emerging from the first chapitre^
musical discourse, with the main plot-line developing the 'radioactive' implica-
tions of the piece's opening key idea and then the subplot emerging to establish

a new key idea and, with it, a second enigma: t

relationship between the music's two key ideas, t
and the diatonic set class [0257], which will eventua
idea 2. If this had indeed been intended as the first
one might imagine that, in a strikingly novel way,
subject groups has been presented, only for the mus
of the development section - an idea which, given w
(and Lutoslawski's concerns about its title), has
movement's unresolved plot-lines return unexpecte
force, to invade the final chapitre.
Part of the effectiveness of that eventual invasio
intervening music's suggestion that nothing of the
pour orchestres inner intermdes and chapitres wer
cation of overarching musical narrativity, fraying th
at the end of the first chapitre and, in so doing, im
unconnected musical miniatures.71 In terms of t
however, this proves to be an elegant deception. Th
inner chapitres is far from insignificant.
Rae's analysis of the intermdes is representative
that it adds little to Lutoslawski's publicly stated
these limited-aleatory interludes, although he does
their pitch content, rhythm and instrumentation.7
ways in which the instrumentation changes. The fir
noodlings of three clarinets, the second for two cla
for harp and piano (the harp replacing one clarinet
other two clarinets, as indicated in Fig. 4). The effe
tation over the course of the three intermdes is g
world of the finale's opening into focus. Rae also ob
sation of the overlapping instrumental parts (Ex. 4
a twelve-note cluster spanning G3 to Ftt4, form
overlapping tetrachords' with the 'pattern of tone/
they are actually used horizontally with interval pai
This leads to the rather different interval class 2 +
[0257] from the twelve-note interval class 1 clus
complementary pitches (Ex. 5). However, the mo
formed by this interval-class trinity is to the prom
Fig. 4 Scoring of the three intermdes
First intermde
Clarinet 1
Clarinet 2 Clarinet 2
Clarinet 3 Harp Ham

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1
:i f ;
Vu
Tb
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st I 1*
^ ^^ "St * ^
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Tournai compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
the Enigma of Musical Narrativity 27 1
Ex. 5 First intermde, pitch complementation and org
Cl. 1 Cl. 2 Cl. 3
ft) 2 ^ti ~o 2 'o' 2 s 7 ',o * ^ 1 fit
Ex. 6 Zi?;n? po^r orchestre' s two key ideas
Key
idea 1 /^f/*^ 4 ^'
i* ' tl ft* -> / / / ' .
quality 2
between
significa
among ot
This patt
[0347] of
crystallis
the first
class the
composer
one migh
opening o
centripe
favour of
The inte
tandem w
fore-like
Had Luto
would ha
album of
would ha
more mo
have lack
a large n

describe these similarities as connec

takes such a description to imply a plo
over the course of the first three chap
Discussing the coherence created by
tures and motives which recur throug
composed in 1968), Gyrgy Ligeti coin
bution and refraction of this network
reminded Ligeti of the ways in which
patterns by presenting ever-changing
useful analogy can be borrowed to des
chapitres of Livre pour orchestre. Rath
through these sections, the term 'kale
ence provided by old ideas recurrin
emerges from Livre pour orchestre
reorientation of its entire mode of or
ernist permutations are replaced by a
central movements, however, this has
these chapitres resides in their self-
character of the Livre pour orchestre t
tious movements, the coherence of w
developmental inconsequentiality.
The opening of the troisime chapi
opening at the movement's close, is
The intervallic content of these moments also offers a reminiscence of the work's
opening and of its two key ideas (Ex. 7a and b). The kaleidoscopic unity of
connections formed between and within the inner movements of Livre pour
orchestre and its intermdes, in contradistinction to Lutoslawski's intentions, there-
fore serves continuously to remind the perceiver of the key components of the
first chapitre^ plot, albeit without actually advancing that story. At no point, in
other words, can the opening movement's concerns be entirely forgotten.
Instead, elements of the piece's two key ideas are glimpsed often enough to imply
a dotted line of gone-but-not-forgotten narrativity linking the first chapitre to
events yet to come. What remains is to connect the dots.
If one is tempted to conceive of Livre pour orchestres first chapitre as being
somewhat like a sonata-form exposition, the inner movements could be heard
as insertions within a large-scale 'sonata deformation',78 and the finale as the
continuation, development and conclusion of a symphonic narrative interrupted
at the end of the opening movement. Both subplot and plot re-emerge and evolve
in the finale, predicating the music's plot-lines and, in so doing, twisting its
ontology.
That twist in the musical tale is connected to a trick much discussed in the
Lutoslawski literature. Lutoslawski informatively titles his finale C3me intermde
et chapitre final', presumably to reflect the fact that there is no distinct break
between the last intermde and the final chapitre. Instead, the finale evolves from

Ex. 7
(a) Third chapitre, opening
4 J = 160
fp _ yp m^^=====~- jp -
^_;^=^^ ^=-
^' y ^ ==
^^Vgg
(b) Evocation
if - la
y ^ft^
J J. $ y J J ^ J^X> J^ ^J/ J ^ y J J ^ J^
y 1 I ft* 1 1 o^^^'"0! ^
the third intermde. Instructions in the score indicate that the conductor should
adopt the same nonchalant attitude (relax-, mop brow, and so on) at the start of
the finale as during the other intermdes. Yet the change of instrumentation - the
pairing of piano and harp, the loss of the clarinets - immediately indicates a
different musical character. The new situation is then signalled more definitively
by changes to the intermde material itself, changes which become even clearer

when (at rehearsal numbers 402 and 403) the conductor does not end the
texture for harp and piano, but instead cues new instruments (tubular bells, then
cellos playing pizzicato). Consequently, the music does not stop after about
twenty seconds. Instead, this intermde evolves, expanding and metamorphosing
dynamically, and becoming the pointillistic backdrop to a pair of arco cello lines
at rehearsal number 404. These entwined lines, which sound a plangent semi-
tonal knot of As and Bl>s (bowed pitches anticipated by the cellos' At and Bl>
pizzicatos at rehearsal number 403, which contract into the semitonal dyad at
rehearsal number 404), therefore signal the final chapitre'^ actual starting point,
in other words, its first static or functional event. Fig. 5 presents an overview of
the finale's structure.
As the string cantilena initiated by the two cellos unfolds and other instru-
ments are added to its mass, its limited-aleatory textures, Lutoslawski stated,
'acquire more and more meaning'.79 How? For one thing, they develop sonorities
that are harmonically more complex, implying a sense of developmental cause
and effect. As part of this process, the cantilena leaches distinct pitches out of the
backdrop until only untuned percussion and piano clusters remain in the inter-
mde layer, which vanishes entirely when, as Lutoslawski himself put it, cwe reach
the orchestral tutti [rehearsal number 410], which can't possibly be taken for a
moment of relaxation. On the contrary, we are at the height of the musical action' ?
Several noteworthy developments, however, occur before that point.
Initially the interval class 2 + 3 + 5 quality of the work's second key idea
dominates both layers of the music. This quality can be heard in the individual
voices contributing to the pointillistic intermde texture; it is then taken up, more
significantly, by the harmonies of the cantilena's limited-aleatory chorus of
strings as their song of rising intensity comes to prominence (Ex. 8). The knot of
As and Bts at rehearsal number 404 might suggest the interval class 1 at the
centre of the piece's opening sonority or remind one of the pitch class A's role in
the opening chapitre, but more locally it functions as a dissonance which is
resolved at rehearsal number 405 by a [0257] sonority (the first of two promi-
nent, bookending presentations of this chordal encapsulation of key idea 2 in the
finale) which briefly blooms when the two cellos are augmented by violas to form
the second event in the movement's functional sequence.
These moments begin to reveal the extent of the literally duplicitous trick
played by the final chapitre. When the fore-reinforcing intermde material associ-
Fig. 5 Third intermde and final chapitre, structural overview
Introduction
Third intermde
Reh, nos 401^03
Harp, piano, bells a

pizz. intermde (st

Ex. 8 Harmonies articulated by the string cantilena
|4()4| |-H)5| |-K)6| |-4()7| |4()s| |4()c)| J41()a|
- : ^ftflfl ; f58 ': :^3

k) = = = = = =#8 ' < =
' ' ' ' tfo =
ated with key i

numbers 404-409 reformulates the interval classes of the intrmede's [0257]
pattern making (interval classes 2 + 3 + 5), the intermde music is not only going
against the grain of the anti-developmental musical model it has thus far helped
to define-, but can also be heard to continue the subplot crystallised by the
emergence of the second key idea and its quality at the end of the first chapitre.
By developing the intermde, the finale forges a link back to the opening move-
ment's coda and invites one to read its musical plot as picking up where the first
chapitre ended. The sections are no longer the independent short stories of an
album-like collection: an overarching plot is beginning to take shape, as if the
outer movements were connected by a single narrative arc separated by the
mega-intermde of the kaleidoscopic inner sections. Other developments will
shortly strengthen this sense of connection, when subplot yields to plot.
The limited-aleatory string textures in rehearsal numbers 404-409 form a
neat example of part of a functional sequence. The new harmony revealed by
each sonority in this chain of events is close enough to its predecessor and
successor harmonies to suggest a quasi-logical process of transformation,
working through permutations of key idea 2 in search of a more apposite quality
solution. The six-note symmetrical harmony at rehearsal number 406, for
instance, is formed of whole tones and a semitone spanning a boundary interval
of interval class 3; rehearsal number 407's nine-note chord sounds like a near-
doubling (in number of pitches, but also in richness of tone) of the [0257] chord;
the ten-note sonority at rehearsal number 408 is built entirely from adjacent
interval class 2s, save for the semitone about which its symmetry pivots; and
rehearsal number 409 's twelve-note sonority also feels like an expanded version
of the [0257] chord. One might thus be led to expect, within the conventions of
Lutoslawski's mature style, the imminent arrival of a twelve-note ad libitum,
which would secure the developmental ascendancy of the second key idea.
In fact, the actual ramifications of rehearsal number 410 (Ex. 9) are more
complex. The cantilena perorates with a twelve-note sonority which, in pairing
interval classes 3 and 5, can be heard as a culminating development of the second
key idea (that is, as being derived from its kernel chord's innermost and bound-
ary intervals) and thus of the functional plot sequence that began at rehearsal
number 404. Given the absence of interval class 2s, however, a major change in
quality is immediately perceptible - not least because the music returns, at this

Ex. 9 Livre pour orchestre, rehearsal n
*#^- " ^j " -
1 1 $3-. ^=J- fc-

^=J-
/. .,.
/... .
1 *=^=^m2 :>r , 'f 'f '

"
111 1 ^^^^ ' 'f ' ,

" tettfctiiif .
VLl ^^p.-n^TlfT ||: r r" - -
'

Fig. 6 'Subplot' leading to 'plot' in the final chapitre
Key idea 1 plot: ''o' ...'4Vi' ...[4451
Key idea 2 plot: |404| ...|405| -|406| ...|407| ...|408| ...|409[ ...|41|
pivotal moment, to alternative quality concerns left unresolved b

plot-line of the opening chapitre: the search for a resolution to the pie
idea and its enigma regarding which quality obtains, interval cl
interval class 4 + 5 (over A or E).The effect (the renewal of long-rang
is doubly enthralling. Over the coming minutes, the question of
orchestres nature (whether it is to be a livre or a symphony) begins
parallel with its now (apparently) not only overarching but also
akcja, as the primary stream of plot which coursed through the open
resurfaces in the finale. In a series of increasingly impressive mu
(at rehearsal numbers 410, 413 and 445, as indicated in Fig. 6), th
then washes away the livre model, reshaping the nature of the
piece.
Rehearsal number 410 owes much of its magic to the meticulously sculpted
enrichment and broadening of timbre and texture which introduces cantabile
flutes and brass tone into the cantilena's hitherto string-based sonorities. The
cantilena has also been rising upwards by a series of interval class 1 and 3 steps
in the 'bass' (note the intervals), transferring it into a higher tessitura against the
panoramic backdrop of the now percussive background layer (although this
texture has also come to be dominated by the high-pitched metallic sheen of
cymbals and gongs). After rehearsal number 410, however, the cantilena expands
downwards to employ the orchestra's lower registers, and the musical fore-
ground, so to speak, expands to fill the breadth and depth of one's perceptions.
This turning point creates the piece's strongest parallel to McCreless's and
Novak's 'semic' events in their Beethoven and Jancek analyses. Rehearsal
numbers 4 10-4 10a (and, later, rehearsal numbers 413 and 445) in Livre pour
orchestre can be heard as being overcoded with a textural effect reminiscent of the
start of the first chapitre. The languorous sighs articulated by the falling and rising
quarter-tone glissandi at the start of the piece return at this crucial juncture,
magnified into the rising and falling cantabile arpeggiations of the texture's
individual lines. The combination of brassy sonorities and string sound here may
also feel significant for 'semic' reasons, since these two opposing timbres blend
(something they obstinately failed to do during the opening movement) within
the developmental alchemy of the final chapitre.
After an intervening passage of dynamic harmonic and textural instability, the
intervallic concerns of the piece's main plot-line are reasserted shortly after
rehearsal number 413. This twelve-note sonority, furthermore, is rooted on E,

and, while it might be slightly fanc

rehearsal number 404 to this at the
number 413, the potential significance
class from which key idea 1, and in
purity of the pairing of interval cl
however, has been usurped here by ad
the arrival on and addition of key idea l's other main interval class mark
rehearsal number 413's twelve-note chord as the next instalment in the piece's
resurgent main plot-line, the chord's quality returns to relative intervallic
ambiguity (3 + 4 + 5). Neither rehearsal number 410 nor 413, therefore, has
combined a substantial chord pairing interval classes 3 and 5 with an in the
bass - a solution to the quality enigma of the first key idea not presented in the
first chapitre.
From rehearsal number 414 the music is again dynamic, and sculpted as if to
suggest momentum slipping away from the resurgent plot-line. One might
wonder: has the best opportunity for a transcendent moment of closure been
missed? If so, the sudden shifting of gears at rehearsal number 419 which
inaugurates the start of the chapitrs second main section may tempt one to
frame one's reading of ensuing events in a manner similar to Robert Hatten's
idea of a radical musical disruption evoking the existence of an authorial or
narratorial presence controlling (or in this case seeking to re-exert control over)
a piece's discourse.81 The ensuing macrorhythmic accelerando^ drive to climax,
while sculpting dynamic expectations of arrival at another significant plot instal-
ment, centres on a process of cutting between cells of foreshortening and
apparently new material. Consequently, it could initially be heard as a shift in
discourse level and an attempt by 'the composer' to intervene and wrest back
control of 'the work' (from its insubordinate symphonic tendencies) by enforcing
this vigorous, grid-like symbol of the livre model's increasingly beleaguered
anti-narrativity. Given Lutoslawski's apparent struggles with the piece's nature
and title, as documented by his letter to Lehmann, such a reading may not be
entirely unrelated to the composer's actual creative struggles.
Gradually, however, this token of Lutoslawski's original intentions is also
subjugated. The ensuing blocks streamline into the macrorhythmic accelerando
that propels Livre pour orchestre towards its apotheosis at rehearsal number 445.
Writing about the last few moments before this culmination, Martina Homma
notes that the silences separating rehearsal numbers 440, 441, 442 and 443 form
the maximum possible contrast to the preceding macrorhythmic accelerando}2
This is a keen observation, to which one might add that the silences lengthen and
thus subtly smooth the transition from the preceding headlong a battuta to the ad
libitum texture at rehearsal number 445, not merely by slowing the pace but by
simultaneously suspending the music's sense of pulsation. Looking further for-
wards, however, these elongating pauses (and the rising chords which punctuate
them) also form a prolepsis anticipating the end of Livre pour orchestre, and thus
a 'semic' connection (the use of silences) between the resolution which is about

to occur (which relates most strongly to key idea 1

the piece (which relates more obviously to key idea
As Stucky notes, the 'wonderfully "consonant"
climax sonority is related, in part, to the solid groun
and to the registrally and timbrally distinct triadic
interval-class content;83 it also forms a striking con
interval-class trinity of 1 + 5 + 6 whose quality s
too, stresses the climax sonority's importance, r
Lutoslawski's choice of 'climactic harmony is a mat
piece.84 Neither commentator, though, discusses the
in terms of the music's resurgent plot-line. The clim
the closural resolution, at the piece's peak of sensuo
generated by its opening question of 'minor or m
'interval class 3 or 4 with 5 (centred on A or E)?'.Th
rhetorical conviction and compelling symphonic log
note sonority firmly rooted on in which onl
adjacently with the perfect fourths and fifths of i
the chords at rehearsal numbers 410, 413 and 445 a
predicate the functional sequence inaugurated by
What follows, however, is not merely empty rhetori
the listener that which is already known. Instea
together the plot threads relating to key ideas 1 an
chord at rehearsal number 445 to the similarly signi
in a gesture of clear organicist intent - organicism b
organisational force in the coda of this now symph
The twenty-eight-note string chord which emerg
a version of the climax chord at rehearsal numb
doublings which eradicate the climax's intervalli
characteristically elegant solution by Lutostawsk
organisation (the sonority is symmetrically wra
third, mixing semitones and whole tones with a
created by overlapping different transpositions
Ex. 10 Key idea l's functional sequence
Start |lO2| || 1 1 OS | b. 12 |41| |413J |445|

XI -o- N'A- I
--w- ff fia -o- ____ -J- I
3/4+5? 4+5 4+5 4+5 3+5 3/4+5 3+5

(AorE?) (A) () ()

Ex. 11 Reworking of rehearsal number

rehearsal number 446
6 1212212111 113 1111 121221216
chord's four-note segmen

unfamiliar effect. Lutoslaw
from the bottom of a cycli
those chords initially encir
stress on is maintained b
This phantasmal reminiscen
function relates to its affir
which, having opened the
akcja's main functional sequ
twist.
The poco meno mosso seve
a manner which initially
E6. At rehearsal number
within the space between
chord's quarter-tone comp
pause, the ending's semic
440 - yield the sonority on
penultimate chord of the
(also semically) at this rhe
the opening of the piece;86
when it arrives, also links
of Livre pour orchestre is n
interlocking interval clas
this point as a closing summ
line), nor is it a repeat of
'correct' pitch class, E. Inst
reveals a version of the [
(Ex. 12).
Scored for a tissue of et
therefore be heard to resolv
not merely by finally reve
moment symmetrical to
chord, but also by suggestin

Ex. 1 2 Livre pour orchestre, close
[447]
-
"f-
fc. V
rt' ' /' ' /
,.li "f-
. 7> * f f f f ~r
* *f ///. i pp ppp
,H^^^^ f f f f f
f ''" PP PPP
V *f .// ^ ^
, ? - f f f f r
,4f^ V ^7 pp ppp
increasingly symphon
proximity of the inter
regards to rehearsal n
ments also hint at sign
the piece's diachronic
imagine that the sem
central minor third of
or even neutralising it
then Livre pour orche
cally, as two sides of a

Ex. 13 Conceptual relationship between
key Key
idea /^-^^ 'dea 2^ ^
I (ic 3) (ic 2) !
: ~~~~~~~~--^-~- - - 5
: (ic 4)
ic 5) ; (ic 1) r (ic 3) ! (ic 5)
I I (ic3)'" (ic 2) ; ;
'
Key idea 1 Key idea 2

(enigma) (neutralisation of enigma/
unification of nlot and subnlofl
Livre pour orchestre or Symphony

It is possible to interpret Livre pou
Lutoslawski's poetics of post-tonal s
channelling the manifesto of Symp
Lutoslawski's theorising, writing a
principled resistance to the high-mo
strophic for music's communicative po
like its opening key idea, turns the tab
mind of a perceiver) in the manner of an
important modernist forebears as wel
cedents. As Lutoslawski once somewha
mid-twentieth-century composer to se
Pierre Boulez's Le livre pour quatuor (
most obvious (thanks to its titular ho
influence of Mallarm's posthumous
that collection of reorderable fragme
need for a poetic, aesthetic and forma
ernist anti-narrativity in Livre pour
classicist narrativity of its emergent
but undermined, as the book of hig
triumphal reimagining of symphon
idiom. In this context, one might wis
Scherer's description, as quoted by
depicts Le livre as a work which coo

album and book, and thus permits a 'double mo

of achieving the clearly sensed diversity of an alb
that as a structured whole'.91 Livre pour orchestre'
dissimilar. Its eventually overarching akcja is pa
narrative concerning a triumph of symphony o
symbolises aspects of a grander narrative of tw
relating to alternative aesthetic positions.
Such an interpretation accords with the thesis th
tive tensions within Lutoslawski's music originate
friction between classicist and modernist tendenci
imagine the 'modernist paradigm' that Arnold Wh
Lutoslawski's finest pieces of the late 1960s and
interactions between opposing tendencies: conne
gressiveness and conservatism, polarity and syn
spelt out than in Livre pour orchestres titular
narrative Livre pour orchestre and the narrative Sy
particular case, one might feel that classicism even
In this respect, the piece could even be heard as
not-exactly-a-symphony composed shortly after Li
ing similar tensions.
Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (1968-9), as Whittall w
'the status of an exemplary modernist manifesto' t
(most prominently to Martin Luther King, Jr.) an
confrontation between Mahler and Beckett - 'a con
around a whole host of other musical references,
diversity that creates a corresponding need to s
Sinfonia therefore inaugurates a powerful centrif
equally forceful centripetal subjugation. And indeed
first performance, add a fifth movement in order
quiet aftermath of the Mahler-Beckett complex) w
which forges connections between materials hea
Sinfonia therefore ends on an even more impas
structural fervour than the heights achieved in its
David Osmond-Smith writes, the 'search for similar
demonstrated by the third movement's uncover
Mahler scherzo, Beckett's The Unnamable and a we
over as an autonomous principle' in Sinfonia's final
the principle of seeking to resolve tensions, as opp
of an unambiguous resolution, which is the key to
together materials from all the previous movem
synthesis. The gesture seems deeply indebted to th
organic completion. In practice it offers neither a
rather an explosion of raw energy'.95 'In this w
essential modernism is reaffirmed rather than dissolved' in a wash of classicism.96

Livre pour orchestras search for synt

fragmentations) seems similarly indeb
for nothing, perhaps, was Lutoslawsk
Hanslick).97 As in Berio's Sinfonia, t
frontation between the competing
connectivity which generates this mu
such confrontations fuel the rage o
Lutoslawski, similar tensions inflame
finale and a quest not only to resolve t
very issue of musical narrativity's po
means of symphonic structuring in
orchestr 's climax is that it marks the
question of plot in a modernist contex
achieves a feat of transformation as im
Berio.
Livre pour orchestre might therefore further be narrativised - if I might be
permitted briefly to play the role of prosopopoeia's ventriloquist, having at least
outlined in detail the emplotment which underlies that stronger interpretation -
as a structure symbolising the potency of narrative's essential quality: change. It
has none of Sinfonia 's politically charged cultural cachet, of course, and its akcja
can scarcely be likened to the highly politicised Actions' of the 1960s and 1970s
that were performed, for instance, by the Viennese 'actionist' Otto Mhl, Joseph
Beuys, or the London-based Destruction In Art Symposium. Lutoslawski, fur-
thermore, steered clear of publicly linking his music to real-life events (as in the
case of the question of his actual Symphony No. 3's possible links to Solidarity,
given its main period of composition between 1981 and 1983); he preferred, if
anything, to direct attention away from the very possibility.98 As with the ulti-
mately deceptive attitude struck by the conductor during Livre pour orchestre' 's
intermdes, however, one might be tempted to read Lutoslawski's position on
such matters as an elegant (and no doubt politically judicious) deception, espe-
cially if one feels that the piece's transformative structure, in struggling to achieve
change and forge agreement in the face of apparently irreconcilable musical,
aesthetic and even ideological oppositions, is echoed in other Lutosiawski pieces
of the period, such as the String Quartet (1964) and Cello Concerto (1969-70).
(Indeed, in Livre pour orchestre the astonishing thing is that agreement and
balance are actually achieved; more often, Lutoslawski's works of the period
reveal an ultimately tragic failure to unite.) One might be tempted, in other
words, to speculate about the subtext of artistic statements on the power, or even
just the possibility, of change - of their ability to envisage and symbolise ways of
doing things differently, by marshalling disparate ideas into powerful new
syntheses - from an artist working in communist Poland in the late 1960s and
early 1970s.99 That the piece can be heard to overthrow a distinctly twentieth-
century spin on conventions of structural governance in favour of older organi-
sational ideas might tempt one to go even further, were it not for the sharp

reminder offered by this very observation that th

forwards by Livre pour orchestre is probably its ae
Livre pour orchestre emerges from even a relative
analysis as one of Lutoslawski's richest composit
the nexus of tensions reflected in Lutoslawski's
title. There can be little doubt, one might argue, t
accomplishment would have served the title 'Symp
Alternatively, one might judge that the more orig
befits the music's individuality. Yet Livre pour o
symphony nor a livre, but a sut generis musica
movement' is unique and, as a result, uniquely pow
title may suit it best of all. It could be time, in oth
this outstanding piece as Lutoslawski's Symphon
NOTES
Livre pour orchestre - Music by Witold Lutoslawski Copyright

Music Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London WIT 3LJ, United Ki
the World except Poland, Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech and Slovak
Rumania, Hungary, the whole territory of the former USSR, Cu
North Vietnam and North Korea where the Copyright, 1969, is held
Wydawnictwo Muzyczne - PWM Edition, Krakow, Poland. All Righ
International Copyright Secured. Reprinted by permission.
1 . Tadeusz Marek, 'Livre pour orchestre by Witold Lutoslawski', Polish Music

p. 12.
2. Marek, 'Livre pour orchestre', p. 12.
3. Originally published as Tadeusz Kaczynski, 'Livre pour orchestre. Rozmowa Witol-

dem Lutoslawskim', Ruch Muzyczny, 13/xvii (1-15 September 1969), pp. 3-5.
Translation in Tadeusz Kaczynski, Conversations with Witold Lutoslawski, 2nd edn,
trans. Yolanta May and Charles Bodman Rae (London: Chester Music, 1995), p. 73.
4 . Blint Andrs Varga, Lutoslawski Profile: Witold Lutoslawski in Conversation with Blint
AndrsVarga (London: Chester Music, 1976), p. 27.
5. Jean-Paul Couchod, La musique polonaise et Witold Lutoslawski (Paris: Stock

Musique, 1981), p. 136; translation mine.
6. Kaczynski, Conversations, pp. 73 and 77.
7. Douglas Rust, 'Conversation with Witold Lutoslawski', Musical Quarterly, 79/i

(1995), p. 209.
8. The composer's own copy of this letter - along with approximately 28,000 further
pages of correspondence with more than 3,500 individuals and institutions - can be
read in the Lutoslawski Collection at the Paul Sacher Stiftung. Always a careful
correspondent, Lutoslawski typed his letters using carbon paper, in order to keep
copies back for his own records.

Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publishin
9. Steven Stucky, Lutoslawski and His Mu

1981), p. 172.
10. 'Zum Abschluss mchte ich noch ein paar Worte ber den Titel des Stckes
verlieren, ich finde, dass der Titel "Livre pour orchestre" ein wenig pretensis klingt
und entspricht nicht ganz der Form des Werkes. Wie Sie sich sicher erinnern
werden, war es meine erste Absicht eine Reihe von kleineren Stcken zu schreiben.
Dafr wrde der vorgeschlagene Titel passen, aber in dem jetzigen Stand der Arbeit
ist mein Werk viel nher einer grossen geschlossenen Form. Darum macht sich die
Suche nach einem neuen Titel erforderlich. Bitte geben Sie mir doch noch ein wenig
Zeit um Ihnen den entgltigen Titel (mglicherweise ganz einfach 3. Symphonie)
mitzuteilen'. Lutoslawski, letter to Berthold Lehmann, 29 May 1968; my transla-
tion. I would like to thank Dr Stanislaw Bdkowski for providing me with a copy of
this letter, and my colleagues Martina Wallner and Dave Rock for helping to finesse
my translation.
11. He may have done so in private. Although none of the Lutoslawski scholars I have
consulted knew previously of the alternative title, Andrzej Chlopecki's recent
Warsaw Autumn programme note on the four acknowledged symphonies speaks of
there being, '[in] actual fact ... five not four symphonies, because Livre pour orchestre
(despite its name) is also a symphony'. See Andrzej Chlopecki, 'Witold Lutoslawski',
in Warsaw Autumn 2004 (Warsaw: Zwiazek Kompozytorw Polskich, 2004), p. 282.
12. Reasonably detailed analyses of Livre pour orchestre appear in Philip Wilby,
'Lutoslawski 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. 1 127-45, and in Andrzej Tuchowski, 'The
Integrative Role of Motion Patterns in Lutoslawski's Mature Symphonic Works: a
Comparison of Livre pour orchestre and the Symphony No. 4', in Zbigniew Skowron
(ed.), Lutoslawski Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 287-304.
For a discussion of these commentaries, Lutoslawski's post-compositional interpre-
tative statements on Livre, and other sources documenting the piece's critical
reception, see my '"Akcja" and Narrativity in the Music of Witold Lutoslawski'
(PhD diss., Cardiff University, 2005), especially pp. 201-15.
13. Joseph Kerman, Concerto Conversations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), p. 47.
14. Roman Jakobson, 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics', in Thomas A.

Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-1.
15. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 'Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?', Journal of the Royal
Musical Association, 115/ii (1990), p. 241.
16. See, for example, Michael Klein, 'Chopin's Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative',
Music Theory Spectrum, 26/i (2004), pp. 23-55; Matthew McDonald, 'Silent Nar-
ration? Elements of Narrative in Ives's The Unanswered Question', 19th-century
Music, 21 lui (2004), pp. 263-86; and Fred Everett Maus, 'Classical Instrumental
Music and Narrative', in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz (eds.),^4 Companion
to Narrative Theory (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 466-83.
17. Beginning with a pedagogical enquiry entitled 'Narrative and Music' (AMS-L,
5 April 2006), the thread quickly evolved under titles including 'Semiotics,
Mendelssohn, and Meaning' and 'What's the Story?'.

18. See, for example, Galen Brown's post on his own

April 2006, 17:44), William Meredith's post on Bee
and Gregory Karl's post touching on music by Bee
others (23 April 2006, 17:14).
19. A notable early exception to this general rule is Jann Pasler's essay 'Narrative and
Narrativity in Music', in J. T. Fraser (ed.), Time and Mind: Interdisciplinary Issues
(Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1989), pp. 233-57. See also Marta
Grabcz, 'Narrativity and Electroacoustic Music', in Eero Tarasti (ed.), Musical
Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music (Berlin and New
York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 535-40; and Vincent Meelberg, New Sounds,
New Stories: Narrativity in Contemporary Music (Leiden: Leiden University Press,
2006).
20. Ferneyhough (somewhat surprisingly, at least to me) described his Carceri

d'Invenzione I (1982) as being plot-like during a documentary interview filmed in
2004 and shown at the London Sinfonietta event 'Inventions: Ferneyhough in
Focus' (14 February 2004). Judith Weir discussed music and narrative in an inter-
view with the present author for the London Sinfonietta. See http://www.
londonsinfonietta.org.uk/perform/weir_interview.html (accessed 23 May 2005).
21. In addition to Nattiez, 'Can One Speak' (1990), important early texts included
Anthony Newcomb, '"Once More Between Absolute and Program Music":
Schumann's Second Symphony', 19th-century Music, 7/iii (1983-4), pp. 233-50;
Fred Everett Maus, 'Music as Drama', Music Theory Spectrum, 10 (1988), pp.
56-73; Patrick McCreless, 'Roland Barthes's S/Z from a Musical Point of View', In
Theory Only, 10/vii (1988), pp. 1-29; Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Ibices: Opera and
Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1991); Robert Hatten, 'On Narrativity in Music: Expressive Genres and
Levels of Discourse in Beethoven', Indiana Theory Review, 12 (1991), pp. 75-98;
Lawrence Kramer, 'Musical Narratology: a Theoretical Outline', Indiana Theory
Review, 12 (1991), pp. 141-62; Joseph Kerman, 'Representing a Relationship:
Notes on a Beethoven Concerto', Representations, 39 (Summer 1992), pp. 80-101;
and William Kinderman, 'Integration and Narrative Design in Beethoven's Piano
Sonata in -flat Major, Opus 110', in Lewis Lockwood, Christopher Reynolds and
James Webster (eds.), Beethoven Forum 1 (1992), pp. 11 1-47. Two important pre-
cursor texts are Edward T. Cone's The Composer's Voice (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1974) and 'Three Ways of Reading a Detective Story - or a Brahms
Intermezzo', Georgia Review, 31 (1977); reprinted in R. P. Morgan (ed.), Music: a
View from the Delft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 77-93. For a
detailed analysis of past and present debates in the literature see my ' "Akcja" and
Narrativity', pp. 138-80.
22. Gregory Karl, 'Structuralism and Musical Plot', Music Theory Spectrum, 19 (1997),
p. 13.
23. Karl, 'Structuralism and Musical Plot', p. 14.
24. Jonathan D. Kramer, 'Moment Form in Twentieth Century Music', Musical

Quarterly, 64 (1978), p. 178.
25. See, for example, Karl, 'Structuralism and Musical Plot' (1997), and Kinderman,
'Integration and Narrative Design' (1992).

26. Nattiez, 'Can One Speak', p. 245.

27. Nattiez, 'Can One Speak', p. 243.
28. See, respectively, the works by Hatten, Maus, Kerman and Karl referenced above in
n. 21.
29. Alan Street, 'The Obbligato Recitative: Narrative and Schoenberg's Five Orchestral
Pieces, Op. 16', in Anthony Pople (ed.), Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 183.
30. Maus, 'Classical Instrumental Music and Narrative', p. 467.
3 1 . My own developing concept of musical narrativity, which takes off from reader-
response theory, engages more thoroughly with the implications of this point than
the theoretical apparatus adapted to serve a very specific purpose in this paper.
32. For a fuller overview of Lutoslawski's poetics of musical plot see my 'Lutoslawski,
"Akcja" and the Poetics of Musical Plot', Music and Letters, 88 (2007), pp. 604-31.
33. Working from less documentary material than the present writer, Michael Klein
and Douglas Rust have both examined the notion of akcja, reaching interestingly
interconnected views (particularly regarding issues of texture) in Douglas Rust,
Theory of Form for Lutostawski's Late Symphonic Works' (PhD diss.,Yale Univer-
sity, 1994) and Michael Klein, 'Texture, Register, and Their Formal Roles in the
Music ofWitold Lutoslawski', Indiana Theory Review, 20/i (1999), pp. 37-70. Rust
has incisively refined his views on texture in recent years, notably without continu-
ing to discuss these issues under the rubric of akcja; Klein has produced a fasci-
nating account, drawing on Hatten's work on expressive genre, of what he takes to
be the primarily topical plot of Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 4 (1988-92). See
Douglas Rust, 'Two Questions of Perception in Lutoslawski's Second Symphony',
Perspectives of New Music, 42/ii (2004), pp. 190-221, and Michael Klein, Intertex-
tuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004),
pp. 108-36. The manuscript 'Problems of Music Form' is part of the Lutoslawski
Collection of the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basle. The terms in this discussion were
extracted from that manuscript. For a more thoroughgoing examination of the
terms and their source, see the article referenced in n. 32.
34. Irina Nikolska, Conversations with Witold Lutoslawski (1987-92), trans. Valeri
Yerokhin (Stockholm: Melos, 1994), p. 113.
35. For a more detailed account of akcja and its implications for Lutoslawski criticism,
including a detailed discussion of 'Problems of Musical Form' and other lectures,
see my 'Lutolawski, "Akcja" and the Poetics of Musical Plot' (2007). Composers
lucky enough to have worked alongside Lutoslawski are beginning to report on
examples he gave from his own and other composers' music of key ideas and other
significant matters. Steven Stucky has informed me, for example, that Lutoslawski
would habitually play the first theme of Debussy's Sonata for Violin and Piano at the
piano in answer to the question 'What is a key idea?'. Following up on these leads
is an urgent necessity, as is an examination of Lutoslawski's sketches with a view to
discerning his workings on key ideas. It is impossible to say definitively what was on
Lutoslawski' s mind when he played this example, but one might nonetheless have
fun speculating. After all, even before the first violin theme in bars 5-14, the piano
outlines two enigmatic chords: G minor rising to C major (bars 1-4). Lutoslawski

considered shifts in mode (for example, from minor

type of tonal effect he sought to reimagine through h
Here, one might wonder if the enigma to be resolved i
a more complex sense, it might be 'G minor as of C
minor?'. Neither minor nor major, and neither G minor nor C major, in other
words, is secured by this progression, and one might reasonably expect what follows
to investigate, if not fully resolve, the matter. When the violin theme itself enters, one
hears two descending triadic motives, one outlining G minor, the other E> major
(bars 5-8); minor and major are contrasted again. The El> major motive, moreover,
is unexpectedly supported, when it lands on the pitch E14, by a shift from C major
(with a dominant seventh provided by the violin's B14) to an Et minor chord in the
piano. As well as posing another question - how does Et minor fit into things? - one
might wonder if this chord/key will provide an intermediary between the G minor
and C major of the opening; one might also wonder about the longer-range role in
this piece of shifts in harmonic centre by thirds. In what follows next (bars 9-14)
there are, of course, further intriguing contrasts, and one might very well expect a
sonata to investigate some of them: the obviously contrasting motivic content, say,
most notably the triadic versus the scale gestures, or the rhythmic alternation and
stratification of temporal states, from the feathery, floating violin descent and
sustained opening piano chords to the more urgently directed, rising violin motives
which follow. The question here is thus not what is the key idea, but rather, what is
not a key idea. The only way to find out, of course, is to emplot a response to the
whole piece (in which case the appassionato at bars 56-57 is but one site of poten-
tial interest, as minor shifts by a third to major once again, and in a strikingly new
way).
36. For Lutoslawski the terms 'static' and 'dynamic' refer to the activities of a listener
(absorption in and absorption of an event's syntactical or statistical implications);
they should not be taken as absolute descriptions of an event's musical character-
istics. His terminology is idiosyncratic, of course, in terms of his intended meaning:
understanding a static event involves relating its content to other moments (hardly
a passive act of cognitive stasis), while a dynamic event seeks to invoke a more
passive cognitive experience as the listener enjoys the sensuous ride en route to the
next event demanding that the listener choose to be involved in it.
37. The above sketch is hardly the full story of akjca, and other aspects one would
investigate in a thoroughgoing analysis of an akcja might include the conventions
and situations Lutoslawski adapted from the stage, literature and everyday life; his
deployment of gestures, topics and other musical signifiers with strongly marked
indexical and/or intertextual associations; and the roller coaster of expressive inten-
sity constructed by the composer through his extraordinarily precise control of
musical texture (not least in his limited-aleatory textures) . Such an approach might
usefully seek to draw on aspects outlined by Klein, myself and Rust (see nn. 32 and
33).
38. Roland Barthes, 'Introduction l'analyse structurale des rcits', Communications, 8
(1966), d. and trans. Stephen Heath as 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narrative', in Image - Music -Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977); and Barthes, SIZ
(Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1970).
39. A writerly adaptation of SIZ to narratological music analysis would be well worth
reading, of course, in the context of a postmodern musical narrative; John Zorn's
Spillane (1991) springs to mind, as well as numerous works by Berio.

40. Barthes, 'Introduction', p. 87.
41. Barthes, 'Introduction', p. 117; see also pp. 88-104 (. Functions').

43. Barthes's examples include Ian Fleming's Goldfinger (1959) and Flaubert's 'Un
coeur simple' (1877).
45. See McCreless, 'Roland Barthes's SIZ (1988), and John Novak, 'The Program-
matic Orchestral Works of Leos Jancek: Their Style and Their Extra-Musical
Content' (PhD diss., University of Texas, 1994).
46. Novak, 'The Programmatic Orchestral Works', p. 211.
47. Having said this, as Lutoslawski implies, key ideas relating to texture, mood,
rhythm, timbre, structural organisation and many other musical elements could
function in musical styles where pitch-related enigmas are less significant or, owing
to pitch-organisational complexity, less readily perceptible. See Varga, Lutoslawski
Profile, p. 35.
48. Lutoslawski, as quoted above, was unequivocal on this matter: a symphony 'should
be composed of some musical events that together - one after another - may be
compared to an action, to a plot of a drama, or a novel, or short story'. See Rust,
'Conversation with Witold Lutoslawski', p. 209.
49. Anthony Pople and Ian Bent, 'Analysis, 11, 6: Since 1970', in Stanley Sadie and
John Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edn
(London: Macmillan, 2000), vol. 1, p. 570.
50. Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1997), p. 83. For Kermode's 'tick-tock' see Frank Kermode, The Sense of
an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 45.
5 1 . Such work might usefully branch out to connect with other ongoing investigations
in music theory such as work on musical temporality or on ecological approaches to
the psychology of perception. See, for example, Jonathan Kramer, The Time of
Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York:
Schirmer, 1988), and Eric Clarke, Ways of Listening: an Ecological Approach to the
Perception of Musical Meaning (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005'
52. Alastair Williams, 'Musicology and Postmodernism', Music Analysis,

p. 386.
53. Eero Tarasti, 'Beethoven's Waldstein and the Generative Course', In

Review, 12 (1991), pp. 101-2.
54. Tarasti, 'Beethoven's Waldstein9, p. 101.

55. Tarasti, 'Beethoven's Waldstein9 , p. 101.
56. Tarasti, quoted in Grabcz, 'Narrativity and Electroacoustic Music', p. 539. Tarasti
uses the term 'narrative' here in a different sense from my usage; according to him,
the diachronic composing out of a piece 'narrativises' the achronic concept.

57. Expressive, dynamic and tempo indications refer to

the exception of A2/ii, where pi mosso and meno mo
58. All timings given in the charts are taken from Luto
pour orchestre with the Polish Radio National Symph
1978), the performance on which I relied when carry
59. Stucky, Lutoslawski, p. 124.
62. Charles Bodman Rae, The Music of Lutoslawski, 3rd edn (London: Omnibus Press,
1999), p. 112.
63. Stucky, Lutoslawski, p. 124. Stucky follows a different system for indicating registers
from the present study, which would label these pitches A4 and E5.
64. STATIC la's sonority, though, like the one formed by the arrival of the pause at the
end of STATIC lb, is more specific than even Rae allows, not least owing to the
'quarter-tone heptachord' sustained by the webbing of the compound glissando
articulating its minor-third arc; see Peter Petersen, 'Microtones in the Music of
Lutoslawski', in Skowron, Lutoslawski Studies, p. 336.
65. The accompaniment of the ensuing Andantino even begins with a mirror image of,
and perhaps also a model for, the interlocking interval class 3s of the opening of
Livre pour orchestre (Bl^Dk, F-D) . This possibility sounds especially tantalising when
one listens to the version of Dance Preludes arranged for clarinet and string-heavy
chamber ensemble in 1955 that was given its concert premiere at the Aldeburgh
Festival under Benjamin Britten's baton in 1963.
66. As Petersen argues, Lutoslawski's post- 1960 approach to pitch organisation can be
heard as 'the symbiosis of several tone systems: microtonality, diatonicism ... [,]
pentatonicism', and the composer's individual approach to twelve-note harmony.
His quality-focused approach, while dominant, 'does not mean that other tone
systems occurring in Lutoslawski do not have value of their own'; 'Microtones in the
Music of Lutoslawski', pp. 341-2. It seems clear, in fact, that Lutoslawski imports
or (to use his term) 'borrows' such associations to add nuance to the implications
of his personal harmonic language - just as he borrowed structures and scenarios
from the theatre and earlier musical styles to add nuance to his musical forms.
67. The analytical examples in this article adapt some rudimentary graphic conventions
from Schenkerian analysis merely to clarify the specific ideas being demonstrated;
they are in no way meant to imply an adaptation of the principles of voice-leading
reduction.
68. Stucky observes that this chord is pitch-class set 4-17 [0347]; another sonority of
importance in Livre discussed by Stucky (my key idea 2) is pitch-class set 4-23
[0257]; see Steven Stucky, 'Change and Constancy: The Essential Lutoslawski', in
Skowron, Lutoslawski Studies, pp. 143-7. As Stucky points out, however, 'Forte-style
set-theoretical analysis [in and of itself] is not very useful for understanding
Lutoslawski's music, especially the notion of the equivalency of inverted set-
forms', which otherwise obscure the quality-related function of the harmonies in
Lutoslawski's music; see Stucky, 'Change and Constancy', p. 146, n. 42.

69. For a blow-by-blow close reading of t

plot events, and indeed of the remaind
Narrativity', pp. 216-306.
70. The typical climactic gesture in Lu

expressed in a limited-aleatory texture
7 1 . Lutoslawski described the purpose of

Lehmann: 'The three initial movements of the work are rather dense. After each of
them a moment of relaxation is needed. The short interludes are to serve this
purpose. They consist of quite insignificant music played ad libitum. The conduc-
tor's attitude should suggest that this is the moment for the audience to relax, to
change their position, to cough .... After about 20 seconds, the conductor raises th
baton (to give the signal that the end of the relaxation has come) to interrupt the a
libitum playing and without letting up on the tension begins the next movement
after a pause of five seconds. This is repeated after movements two and three
Quoted in Marek, 'Livre pour orchestre', p. 10.
72. See Rae, The Music of Lutoslawski, p. 110-12. Rae also notes a similar pattern in
Partita (1984), where intervening intermdes interact with the main movements t
form a five-part structure.
73. Rae, The Music of Lutoslawski, p. 111.
74. The second chapitre, moreover, begins quite clearly in the realm of the second key
idea, but the sound world is gradually transformed into a more dissonant one. Th
is a typical example of what I term a 'quality modulation'. The ease with which th
ear can follow this shift between relatively diatonic and relatively chromatic idea
indicates the effectiveness of Lutoslawski's post-tonal language, which actively
encourages one to follow the course of his pieces' harmonic developments (n
something one can say of every mid-twentieth-century composer) .
75. It is the final chord, for example, of Epitaph (1979).
76. See, for example, Stucky, Lutoslawski, p. 168.
77. See Gyrgy Ligeti, Ptr Varnai, Josef Husler and Claude Samuel, Gyrgy Ligen in
Conversation with PtrVrnai, Josef Husler, Claude Samuel and Himself trans. Gab
J. Schabert, Sarah E. Soulsby, Terence Kilmartin and Geoffrey Skelton (Londo
Eulenburg Books, 1983), p. 135.
78. The term is used here as in James Hepokoski, Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 5-9. Hepokoski's observation that a
significant aspect of the content of a sonata deformation is its 'dialogue with ...
generic expectations' (p. 5) suggests the potential for developing a view of Livre
pour orchestre along the lines of, say, a 'multimovement form in a single movement'
(p. 7) encompassing aspects of a symphony and a livre.
79. According to Lutoslawski, 'Subsequent sections, played ad libitum, acquire more

and more meaning, till the listener, who at first took the beginning of this movement
as another interlude, realises that ... something important is beginning to take
place'. See Kaczynski, Conversations, p. 12.
80. Kaczynski, Conversations, p. 72; emphasis added.

81. See Hatten, On Narrativity in Music', p. 76. The author of a text is not to be
equated simplistically with its narrator, of course; for a recent narratological dis-
cussion of authors and narrators dead, implied and resurrected, see Wayne C.
Booth, Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?' and other essays in James
Phelan and Peter J. Rabino witz (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005), pp. 75-88.
82. Martina Homma, Witold Lutoslawski: Zwlfton-Harmonik, Formbildung, 'aleatorischer
Kontrapunkt'. Studien zum Gesamtwerk unter Einbeziehung der Skizzen (Cologne:
Bela Verlag, 1996), pp. 186-7.
84. Rae, The Music of Lutoslawski, p. 114.
85. Rae also notes this stress on E. See Rae, The Music of Lutoslawski, p. 115; Rae
focuses on the progression's upper pitches, not the bass.
86. Petersen, 'Microtones in the Music of Lutoslawski', p. 341. In a very useful com-
panion piece to the essay discussed above, McCreless has theorised the role of
musical elements besides those relating to a functional/hermeneutic sequence in
rhetorically shaping the sense of a piece's ending. See Patrick McCreless, 'The
Hermeneutic Sentence and Other Literary Models for Tonal Closure', Indiana
Theory Review, 12 (1991), pp. 35-73. Wilby's analysis of Livre pour orchestre, and
especially its diagrammatic representation of intensity in the music, indicate some
ways in which the listener's attention is drawn to cardinal matters by sensuous
parameters.
87. Tuchowski's analysis of Livre pour orchestre and other pieces, which regards textural
shaping as a foreground motion pattern calling attention to nodal points of struc-
tural articulation, encourages such a view. See Tuchowski, 'The Integrative Role of
Motion Patterns', especially pp. 296-300; notably, this approach leads Tuchowski to
consider the importance of the pitch in Livre pour orchestre.
88. The composer Magnus Lindberg told me that, to him and other composers of his
generation, Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 2 sounded like a manifesto petitioning for
renewed attention to the possibilities of constructing large-scale symphonic forms
in a modernist idiom.
89. Lutoslawski did not, as Petersen suggests, fail to comment on the existence of other
livres. In his first published interview about Livre pour orchestre, he accepts his
music's place in a lineage including not only Couperin and Bach, but also Messiaen
(his 1951 Livre d'orgue) and Boulez {Le livre pour quatuor, 1948-9). See Petersen,
'Microtones in the Music of Lutoslawski', p. 334, . 33; see also Marek, 'Livre pour
orchestre' .
90. Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, d. Jean-Jacques Nattiez and trans.
Martin Cooper (London: Faber, 1986), p. 148.
91. From Jacques Scherer, 'Le "Livre" de Mallarm', which accompanied the 1957
publication of Mallarm's Le livre (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), as quoted and trans-
lated in Boulez, Orientations, p. 147.
92. Arnold Whittall, 'Between Polarity and Synthesis: the Modernist Paradigm in
Lutoslawski's Concertos for Cello and Piano', in Skowron, Lutoslawski Studies,
pp. 244-5.

Journal compilation 2009 Blackwell Publis
93. Arnold Whittall, Musical Compositio

University Press, 1999), p. 302.
94. David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words: a Guide to Luciano Berio's Sinfonia
(London: The Royal Musical Association, 1985), p. 74.
95. Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words, pp. 74-5.
96. Whittall, Musical Composition, p. 303.
97. I located a bookmarked copy of Hanslick's Music Criticisms 1846-99, trans, and ed.
Henry Pleasants (London: Peregrine Books, 1963), in the library of the composer's
Warsaw home; the bookmark notes Hanslick's review of Brahms's Second Sym-
phony (p. 157), which includes the following remarks: 'Nor are there any furtive
glances in the direction of foreign artistic fields, nor any begging from poetry or
painting. It is all purely musical in conception and structure, and purely musical in
effect'. It is not hard to imagine the potential attraction for Lutoslawski - a
circumspect musical narratologist if ever there was one, seriously unimpressed by
narrativisations - of such a statement.
98. On the other hand, Lutoslawski did tell Nikolska that the construction of musical
forms could be prompted by ordinary life experiences; see Nikolska, Conversations,
p. 90.
99. Other readings stress the music's transformative power. See John Casken, 'The
Visionary and the Dramatic in the Music of Lutoslawski', in Skowron, Lutoslawski
Studies, pp. 36-56; Charles Bodman Rae, 'Lutoslawski's Sound- World: a World of
Contrasts', in Skowron, Lutoslawski Studies, pp. 16-35; and Maja Trochimczyk,
'"Dans la Nuit": The Themes of Death and Night in Lutoslawski's Oeuvre9, in
Skowron, Lutoslawski Studies, pp. 96-124. Casken, for instance, reads (and thus
narrativises) Livre pour orchestre as one of a number of Lutoslawski pieces opening
'new windows onto imaginary worlds', not least through the climax and its after-
math: 'a visionary intensity' followed by 'a mysterious evocation of the Unknown, a
dreamlike vision ... a moment of intense introspection' (p. 40).
ABSTRACT
Despite a lasting ambivalence regarding the title of his 1968 or

Livre pour orchestre, Lutoslawski ultimately consented to publicati
under the name with which it was premiered. Analysts approa
might therefore begin by asking if this work is indeed a livre of in
or a more sustained musical utterance encoding some kind of
musical narrative. Drawing on Lutoslawski's poetics of musica
Barthes's theories of narrative, music-analytical adaptations of
ries, ongoing debates surrounding the issue of musical narra
composer's artistic and social context, this article constructs a clo
piece in which a classicist conception of symphonic plot vies with
structural paradigm reinvigorated by modernism, manipulating a
reversing expectations while sculpting a powerful experience of m


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Livre or Symphony?

Lutosawski's Livre pour orchestre and the Enigma of Musical

Livre or Symphony? Lutoslawski's Livre pour orchestre and

Enigma: a Composer Changes His Mind

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 253

of contrasting elements, that is to

Catalysing Section: Speaking (Circumspectly) of Musical Narrative

2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

During the last twenty years, however, this m

It is evident that many devices ... are not confined to ver

On the other side, however, stand perhaps many m

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

advocate of musical narratology actu

2009 The Author. Music Analysis^ 27/ii-iii (2008)

shifts in the power relationship between soloists a

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

harmonies capable of bearing the deve

Isaw that the main weak point of modern

What, then, are the 'radioactive' co

2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

development in the plot-like chain of static events

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

units of a functional sequence are p

2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

times resolving up to Ft. Part of the development se

The music can thus close securely in D major, ha

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

lurking within a multitude of attemp

2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

terested reflection (although this may still be r

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

It is hoped that speaking of music

Functional Sequence: a Narratological Analysis of Livre pour orchestre

Fig. 1 First chapitre, structural outline

Al/i A2/i Al/ii A2/ii Al/iii Bl/i B2/i B3 Bl/ii

2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

challenge bearing a valuable lesson in relation to

Fig. 2 First chapitre, 'static' and 'dynamic' events

STATICl 1 DYNAMICl I STATIC2 I DYNAMIC2 I STATIC3 I DYNAMIC3

Key ideal: Catalysing Key idea 1:2nd Catalysing Statement of Catalysing

STATIC4 1 DYNAMIC4 I STATIC5 I DYNAMIC5 I STATIC6 I DYNAMIC6

B2/i (start) B2/i(end)

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

Ex. 1 Livre pour orchestre, openings bars

v, , ,|n P=^PP P=^PP P==^PP PZ=~PP

p=~PP P==^PP P==~PP P=^PP PZ=-PP

v, , p=-w p^pp /=- p>pp

y>/>p p>p JiP P P>PP

To avoid confusion, the

2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

Ex. 2 (a) STATIC la and lb

(b) Bars 1-2 and 3-5

j - ~ -,-;" (I) - -f .- 4- >-ifr)

Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008) 2009 The Author.

Ex. 3 First chapitre, functional sequenc

3/4+5? 4+5 4+5 4+5

Fig. 3 'Plot' and 'subplot' plot-lines in the first cha

the pesante string theme identified originally

2009 The Author. Music Analysis, 27/ii-iii (2008)

a new key idea and, with it, a second enigma: t