Lutoslawski on Music. By Witold Lutoslawski. Edited and translated by Zbigniew Skowron. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. [xxiii, 347 p. ISBN-13: 9780810848047. $80.] Illustrations, music examples, references, bibliography, index. Of all the composers of significance in the late twentieth century, it was Witold Lutoslawski whose personality, quite apart from his music, have found most intriguing. He was always well-dressed, and his deportment was immaculate. Generous in his praise of others and gentle with his criticisms, self-effacing, undogmatic, he appeared the most gentlemanly of composers in an era of unbridled rebellion and revolution in art music. often wondered how such a decorous personality could produce vigorously innovative works like Jeux venetiens, the Second Symphony, and Parole tissees? In Lutoslawski on Music, a new collection of the composer's speeches, essays, and other writings edited by Zbigniew Skowron of the University of Warsaw, the answer is plainly evident. Lutoslawski's refined, reticent public persona was simply the outward expression of a musical philosophy grounded not in reaction and novelty (like so many of his contemporaries) but in notions of trust, reason, respect, and intellectual rigor. Through his writings, Lutoslawski confirms that he was what he always seemed to be-a thoughtful, sensitive musical innovator of towering genius whose modesty was genuine and whose insights were uncommonly keen. Skowron's book includes numerous essays and writings that are newly translated into English or published for the first time. Collated with examples drawn from a variety of earlier published sources, they create a remarkably abundant resource for Lutoslawski scholars or, indeed, anyone interested in an insider's view of the post-World War II musical scene. The introduction to the collected writings is a substantial autobiographical sketch Lutoslawski delivered at the request of the Inamori Foundation when he received the Kyoto Prize in October 1993. that occasion, he said, I am not sure whether such a topic of my lecture would be interesting enough to engage your attention for three quarters of an hour. So will try to add to it here and there some thoughts that, as hope, are not quite commonplace (p. xiii). And yet the humble summary of his musical life and aesthetic philosophy that follows is far more engaging than many of the self-serving polemical manifestos that proliferated in the post-World War II era. Skowron organizes the remainder of Lutoslawski's texts into six large chapters. The first, On Beauty, Musical Form, Compositional and Perception, consists of a number of incidental thoughts, lecture notes, workshop transcripts, and texts about the processes behind Lutoslawski's compositional choices. The bulk of this section, and its highlight, is a series of lectures Lutoslawski delivered at Tanglewood in 1962 that detail how he addressed the practical problems of large-scale closed form, pitch organization, limited aleatorism, and rhythm in his own music. Taken together, they are as close as he ever came to writing a treatise on his compositional style. What emerges from these lectures is a picture of the logical and eminently practical approach that Lutoslawski developed, independent of any system or which, he often states in these writings, cannot replace the artistic necessity of intuition and creativity. Technique, he writes, is, at bottom, only a species of invention (p. 16), and durable ideas-what the French call the idee clef-are just as important as technique in producing art of lasting value. These are the first inklings, repeated often throughout the later essays in this book, of Lutoslawski's deep-seated suspicions regarding the long-term viability of dodecaphony and serialism. Though he is rarely critical of serial composers directly, Lutoslawski often refers to the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez as the counter-examples in these contexts. …