Lutoslawski, 'Akcja' , and the Poetics of Musical Plot

Abstract

Hitherto unknown or, at best, forgotten lectures delivered by Witold Lutoslawski in the early 1960s contain revelatory passages concerning his attempts to inculcate substance and plot-like directionality in his music: what the composer, through the development of his personal compositional poetics, came to term his music's akcja ('plot'). The revelations contained in the lectures 'Problems of Musical Form' and 'Pitch, the Interval and Harmonic Aggregate'are outlined in this article in the hope that scholars, musicians, and listeners concerned with Lutoslawski's music will find it both useful and stimulating to engage critically with each lecture's key concepts and the interpretations offered herein. The article then makes a number of suggestions concerning ways in which one might begin to adapt ideas derived from the recoverable traces of Lutoslawski's poetics of musical plot to the analysis and interpretation of his music, before presenting analytical sketches of scores including his Concerto for Orchestra (1950-4), Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1969-70), Chain 2 (1984-5), and Symphony No. 4 (1988-92). It concludes by assessing the potentially revisionist implications of a fuller understanding of akcja for the wider critical debates concerning the scope and successfulness of Lutoslawski's art.