This work, together with the Five songs of 1956 57, saw the significant development of Lutosławski's harmonic and contrapuntal thinking as he introduced his twelve-note system, the fruits of many years of thought and experiment.
Elastic-band stretches brought thoughts of forces and harmonic motion.
Simple harmonic motion is another view of circular motion.
This focus is common to other European traditions, and is known as postmodernism, a school of thought that draws on earlier harmonic and melodic concepts that pre-date the conceptions of atonality and dissonance.
As his thought became more and more mystical, egocentric, and ingrown, his harmonic style became ever less generally intelligible.
Although he was not influenced by the sound or the philosophy of the music, Cage's explorations of indeterminacy set off a train of thought which resulted in Lutosławski finding a way to retain the harmonic structures he wanted while introducing the freedom for which he was searching.
Schubert's notes are not that difficult, but making continuous sense of them requires a single-mindedness of thought and the kind of clear hearing that gives the high-wire harmonic transformations intelligibility.
Even when these are given a more contemporary harmonic or instrumental garb, they remain basically governed by the 19th-century mode of musical thought, to which it is assumed that mass audiences will most easily react.
But given the composer's limited, indeed claustrophobic, harmonic world, his tendency toward rigidly symmetric sequences and the disconcerting frequency of the same musical thought in a large number of different works, sustaining serious interest in an all-Vivaldi program poses somewhat of a challenge.
Even the 1964 string quartet by Witold Lutoslawski became a thing of recurring beauty: passages of harmonics like a fall of stars; rich chords sounding together before wandering off onto individual tangents of thought, each following its own specified path, but at will, in the composer's version of controlled chance.
