Lutoslawski Video: It's Mi Parti and I'll Cry If I Want To

Lutoslawski (R): Garden party guests never tired of Witold's jokes about limited aletoricism and Soviet repression.

Alright so this post isn't actually about Lutoslawski's piece Mi Parti but I had to make use of that pun at some point - it was rapidly burning a hole in my blog-post-pun-title-pocket.

Instead you can watch a documentary imaginatively entitled 'Open Rehearsals With Witold Lutoslawski'. It was produced in 1984 for the USC School of Music.

I wasn't aware this existed until I spotted it in Ádám Kondor's FB news feed today (thanks to him then). Interesting to see him rehearse and conduct various bits and pieces of his repertoire and to hear him discuss some of his ideas (no new insights really, you'll find the same arguments in Conversations With Witold Lutoslawski and The Music of Lutoslawski for instance. Nice to hear it from him directly though, perhaps).

Below is the first part, you'll need to find the other three yourself. Good luck, we're all counting on you (ad libitum, natürlich).

TinyURL for this post: http://tinyurl.com/6y3m6bn

Text Quote For The Fifth of March

An all interval row, from Berg's Lyric Suite, courtesy of this page from Northern Arizona University.

I have been researching into the matter of twelve-tone chords, I have categorised them - I came to the conclusion that the fewer the number of constructive intervals is the more characterisitc the resultant chord sounds.

Sometimes I use chords constructed with three or four intervals, though; but the building material of my chords never amounts to Schoenberg's Allintervallreihe ('row consisting of all twelve intervals'), because such 'omni-intervallic' chords cannot but turn out colourless, insipid, flat and tame (although in some - execeptional - cases chords constructed in this fashion can be useful, too.)

Conversations With Witold Lutoslawski: Irina Nikolska (pg 121)

The grammatical error in the first paragraph is due, I think, to the translation from Polish to English, a few lightly amusing malapropisms also result, such as, 'from the angel of pitch organisation', and, 'Debussy himself was an empiricist of the first water' (both from p76.)

Visual Quote For The Fifth of March

'Lutoslawski's sketches of texture'. Click for larger image. (example 16c Pg181) from Conversations with Witold Lutoslawski; Irina Nikolska.