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.