The cultural repression of Poland began slowly to thaw after Stalin's death in 1953. Within a year, for instance, Witold Lutosławski was contemplating a commission offering him the chance – his first since the onset of World War II – to compose and then to hear publicly performed experimental music. His response to this opportunity was a work that could scarcely have been further removed from the socialist realist mandate for upbeat folklorism fulfilled by his then most recent major pieces, the neo-classical and tonal Concerto for Orchestra (1950–54) and Dance Preludes (1954). Earlier scholarship on this departure has tended to sideline its idiosyncratic utilization of dodecaphony as a transitional road-not-taken in Lutosławski's development of a modernist voice, albeit while noting the piece to be a particularly wellrealized example of the initial phase of Polish engagement with the postwar musical avant-garde. More recently, Lisa Cooper Vest has identified its function (see previous chapter) as an expedient calling card, at home and abroad, for a musician feted as Poland's next leading composer, thanks in part to its combination of cautious innovation and expressive tendencies looking back to the recent musical past – the core elements of what Steven Stucky identified as the piece's ‘undogmatic and humanistic modernism’.

In another sense, however, the new piece would prove to be foundational Lutosławski. A quadrilateral equation of grief in which signifiers of lament, anger and violence calculate the unknown quantity – suffering – the music set a template for many Lutosławski pieces yet to come. The title of the work, in turn, indicates ways in which Lutosławski's first post-Stalinist composition could be conceived as an experiment in more than just a new compositional language. Its chief symbolic topic, mourning, was an experience with which Lutosławski had become horribly well acquainted by 1954. The music may also mark, as such, a turning point after which Lutosławski's works achieve a more strongly personal quality, the interpretation of which demands judicious analysis of both music and context – a complicated and controversial task for Lutosławski scholarship, as discussed shortly below. First, however: what should this defining piece be called?

In 1954, conductor and Lutosławski supporter Jan Krenz suggested to the composer that he write some music to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Bartók's death on 26 September 1955.

Witold Lutosławski – arguably Poland's finest twentieth-century composer – persistently denied the existence of any kind of relationship between his compositions and the circumstances of their creation. Moreover, he sought to exert authorial control over the critical discourses surrounding his creative output, effectively stifling any investigation that questioned the validity of his denials. Problematically for musicians and academics interested in such matters, he was largely successful in this venture. For instance, his heated exchange with critic Tadeusz Kaczyński about the climax of the Cello Concerto (1969–70) is the stuff of legend in Lutosławski studies. A regular interviewer, Kaczyński consistently attempted to provoke his friend Lutosławski into some kind of confession about the links between the dramas of his works and the dramas of his life in the wider world, and the Cello Concerto seemed to offer particularly fertile ground for such revelations. Kaczyński described the culmination of this theatrical concerto – eleven stinging orchestral sonorities from which the soloist retreats with wounded gestures – as a rebellious soloist receiving a beating from an authoritarian ensemble. Lutosławski, true to form, rebuffed Kaczyński's probing. He vehemently halted the discussion of the Cello Concerto in its tracks, exclaiming: ‘I must immediately use the reins of this galloping imagination!’ The exchange with Kaczyński was no outlier.

Lutosławski's allegiance to modernist (ultimately, Romantic) notions of autonomy put him in good company in the larger landscape of twentiethcentury art-music composition. The post-war serialists were famously prickly when it came to discussing musical meaning; in cold-war Budapest, György Kurtág, like Lutosławski, sought to distance himself from a flawed, quotidian reality. Recent scholarship, however, has started to interrogate these views.

Concepts such as an easily separable ‘life’ and ‘works’, for example, were reappraised during critical musicology's rethinking of music as cultural text in the 1990s and 2000s, which demonstrated – surely incontrovertibly – that the values of individuals and communities can be represented, intentionally or otherwise, by symbolic practices such as composing and, indeed, the myriad additional forms of musical activity surrounding and engaged in by composers. The infusion of anthropological and sociological perspectives into musicology is having equally transformative effects, further facilitating an understanding of music making as a socially contingent form of cultural production.

Prologue

‘My’ modernism operates in large part through two ways of relating to the past: call them continuity and historicism.

– Steven Stucky, ‘Searching for the Mainstream’

Over the last dozen years of his life, composer and Lutosławski expert Steven Stucky gave a series of public lectures exploring his recent thinking about Lutosławski in the context of Steve's developing ideas about modernism and compositional practice in the early twenty-first century. These lectures included the three papers from which the essay below has been assembled: ‘Searching for the Mainstream’ (the first of his three Ernest Bloch Lectures, given at the University of California, Berkeley on 15 September 2003), ‘Lutosławski and the Continuing Story of Harmony’ (paper given at the Symposium of the International Musicological Society, Melbourne, 14 July 2004), and ‘Heart and Brain, Tradition and Modernism: A Key Moment in Lutosławski's Fourth Symphony’ (paper given at the conference ‘Muzyka Witolda Lutosławskiego u progu XXI wieku. Dookreślenia – oceny – perspektywy’, Narodowego Instytutu Fryderyka Chopina, Warsaw (26 September 2013).

The last of these three papers – which drew content from the other two and added new material on Lutosławski's Symphony No. 4 – was Steve's intended contribution to the Lutosławski's Worlds collection. He sent it for discussion at the workshop held at Keele in 2015, after which Lisa Jakelski and I invited him to develop it further by combining it with aspects of the paper I remembered hearing him give in Melbourne about Lutosławski and harmony – because in truth, like ‘Heart and Brain’, that paper was about Lutosławski's connections to composers past and present, not least Steve himself, and how such connections might be suggestive of an alternative narrative of musical modernism. Although work on compositional projects looked set to scupper Steve's plans to develop the essay along these lines, he remained keen to do so – and then, as many readers of Lutosławski's Worlds will know, Steve died on 14 February 2016.

In late 2016, partly as a tribute to Steve – but primarily because the ideas and means of expression in these three papers bore all the hallmarks of his ground-breaking, consistently excellent, vitally important published work on Lutosławski – I approached his wife, Kristen Frey Stucky, with the idea of creating an essay along the lines Steve had planned for the collection.