Nicholas REYLAND

Lutosławski’s Listener(s)

Lutosławski’s Listener(s)

Was Witold Lutosławski a musical narcissist? His late 1960s essay

‘The Composer and The Listener’ unveils the iden$ty of his ideal audience mem-

ber. When composing, Lutosławski wrote, he bore in mind an atypical, very

par$cular and fic$$ous listener based on ‘the one listener about whom I really

know something’: himself. Lutosławski’s imaginary auditor was thereby

modeled on his own ‘long and con$nually enriched experience in the field of

listening to music’, with ‘[c]rea$on and percep$on intermingl[ing]’ as ‘elements

of the same complex phenomenon’.

The composer then fre1ed about whether this eliminated ‘the “average

listener”’ from his composi$onal considera$ons, which might begin to sound

‘ego$s$cal’ or even ‘an$social’. Is it a breach of some ar$s$c contract,

Lutosławski wondered, to ignore one’s ‘ethical duty to society’ for the pleasure of

‘fulfilling the desires of this one listener’? Having hinted that this may be the only

way an ar$st can aspire to authen$city, Lutosławski then wrote of his hope that

his desires might nevertheless be similar enough to a few other listeners’ desires

that ‘the music I compose can be of some value’.

As musicians and audiences around the world celebrate Lutosławski’s life and

music in 2013, his centenary year, one would like to think that the composer’s

fre7ng could finally be laid to rest. Hundreds of thousands of people will

experience his music this year; many will be u1erly enraptured. Exploring the

nature of that rapture in the remainder of this short essay will suggest subtle$es

of Lutosławski’s posi$on on the rela$onship between ar$sts and

audiences, and touch upon the deeper mo$va$ons of his art.

Worldwide centenary celebra$ons aside, here are two further ways to counter

Lutosławski’s fre7ng. First, one might consider the cultural context of the

essay and his music. Under Stalinist socialist realism and Polish communism,

Lutosławski resisted (more successfully than many) the pressure to allow his

ar$s$c achievements to become a mouthpiece of The State. Instead, as his

statements consistently reiterated, he sought to give the fullest possible

account of his own inner world of the imagina$on. By composing for his

imagined listener, Lutosławski was thus fulfilling an ethical duty, even making a

poli$cal statement. His music is the tes$mony of a self that gives ‘the truest form

to what [he had] to communicate to others’.

Second, the music taking that ‘truest form’ reveals that, when it came to

communica$ng beyond his ideal listener, Lutosławski need not have worried;

indeed, one suspects he was well aware of his true powers in this regard.

Elsewhere in the essay, Lutosławski wrote that a work of art’s main purpose is ‘to

play on the human mind’; composing is the crea$on of ‘a definite complex of

psychological experiences for the listener’. Lutosławski’s music thereby plays

with our embodied minds and aspects of percep$on accessible to any listener,

focusing on music as ‘direct experience’, as opposed to a process of structural

code breaking. Music is about ‘sound effects’, he wrote: it is sound that affects.

So how are Lutosławski’s listeners affected? And what do those experiences tell

us about his desires and inten$ons? Consider the pieces he premiered from 1968

onwards, the year in which his essay was published. Livre pour

orchestre, the Cello Concerto, Preludes and Fugue, Les espaces du sommeil and

Mi-par� form as impressive a sequence of composi$ons as any other

produced in the twen$eth century. And at the heart of each work is a climax of

devasta$ng, almost trauma$zing violence, sculpted with a sonorous power

hitherto rarely heard in music. Each piece, in turn, proposes a journey beyond its

trauma: a chilly equilibrium (in Livre), a pyrrhic victory (the concerto),

transcendence suddenly torn away (the end of the Fugue and Les espaces),

rhapsody releasing the celes$al (Mi-par�). Lutosławski’s life – like the lives of so

many of his Polish compatriots – was a story of surviving the worst in life. His

pieces’ fusions of sensuousness and symbolism may therefore offer

listeners – himself and others – a chance to undergo and work through musical

approxima$ons of trauma, tragedy and transcendence.

Or they may not. Lutosławski discouraged these kinds of specula$ons, and in a

manner that might be considered the ethical twin to composing ‘for himself’. His

statements on interpreta$on adopt a posi$on explained in a significant

later essay, ‘Some Thoughts on the Percep$on of Music’. Not only do different

people hear different things when experiencing the same sounds, he wrote, but

the same listener experiences ambigui$es when listening; one also hears

different things every $me one listens to a piece; and this ‘variety of

percep$on greatly increases’ when one considers ‘psychological reac$ons’ and

‘the realm of associa$ons’, i.e., ‘extra-musical interpreta$ons of sensa$ons’. To

exemplify this phenomenon, Lutosławski explored the manner in which his music

could produce diametrically opposed readings. He recounted divergences

between listener interpreta$ons and his own feelings about his First Symphony

(‘immense suffering’ vs. ‘serenity’), Cello Concerto (‘risky sa$re’ vs. ‘serious and

straighHorward’), and String Quartet (‘humorousness’ vs. ‘the last work in which I

would want to express humour’) – and he did so as a means to an end. In the

end, he claimed, music’s message ‘must remain indefinable’.

Once again, though, one has to weigh his words carefully. Lutosławski did not

want single readings to become a1ached to his composi$ons. Living in a world

where the authori$es controlled the narra$ve of individual lives through the

imposi$on of universal lies, he preferred to create music that respects and

empowers the individual’s right to interpret. The film director Krzysztof

Kieślowski once said that, in the West, people do not know what it is like to live in

a world without representa$on. In the Communist East, ar$sts like Kieślowski

and Lutosławski shaped art through which subjec$vity could be

experienced and explored. Just as our minds seek the source and explana$on of a

sudden caress or a blow to the body, Lutosławski’s music challenges us to decide

which emo$ons should channel their affec$ve experiences, and which

associa$ons with life his ‘definite complexes of psychological experiences’

approximate or transcend.

And if there are answers to these ques$ons, they are located in the ‘direct

experience’ of Lutosławski’s music – in becoming one of Lutosławski’s listeners.

Dr Nicholas REYLAND

Senior Lecturer in Music,

Keele University (United Kingdom)