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born in Warsaw in 1954, he studied the double bass and
composition (with Włodzimierz Kotoński) at the Academy of Music in Warsaw.
Thanks to a Witold Lutosławski grant, he continued his compositional
studies abroad, with Isang Yun in West Berlin and Klaus Huber in Freiburg on
Br. (1986–87). As a double-bass player he focuses on the solo
contemporary repertoire. He has performed in many European countries, Asia
and the United States. He is also active in the field of promoting
contemporary music and arts education. He ran several cycles of radio
programmes introducing children into the world of new music and cooperated
with the Children’s Arts Centre in Poznań. He was Artistic Director
of the iscm World Music Days in Warsaw in 1992. He was invited as a lecturer
at the Darmstadt Courses in 2004. He has served as Director of the
International Festival of Contemporary Music ‘Warsaw Autumn’
since 1999.
Selected works (since 1984): Opened Series IV for double
bass (1984), Trio for Violin, Double Bass and Piano (1985), Recitative Music
for percussion, piano, violin, viola and double bass (1985), Collage-Tango
for piano (1985; version for chamber orchestra – 1995), Ductus for
small string orchestra and harpsichord (1985), Chamber Poem for two violins,
double bass and piano (1986), Numerous Branches of Ramified Plaits for
clarinet, piano and cello (1987), Opened Series V for double bass (1988),
Gestures of Soul for organ, accordion, synthesizer, guitar and percussion
(1989), Metaphysical Ballad for orchestra (1990), A Thread Is Spinning... I
for cello (1991), A Thread Is Spinning... II for violin (1992),
A Thread Is Spinning... III for double bass (1992), Opened Series VI for
double bass (1993), Out of the Depths I Sing... for wind instruments,
strings and percussion (1993), Beggar’s Ballad for chamber ensemble
(1994), Egocentric poem for amplified piano and tape (1994–95), Id for
orchestra (1995–96), Study of Gesture I for clarinet, piano and cello
(1995), Study of Gesture II for piano (1997), Concerto ± rebours for violin
and orchestra (1998), Th¬sis for solo flute (2000), Study of Gesture III
for clarinet, trombone, piano, cello and double bass (2000), Credo, quia
absurdum for tape and female dancer (2001), Time of Stones for chamber
ensemble and amplified double bass (2002), Tafle for orchestra (2002),
String Quartet (2004), The Whisper of Semitones for double bass and chamber
ensemble (2004).
String Quartet
The performances of the Silesian Quartet have always come across to me in a
very convincing way. I have grown up listening to its creations. In fact, it
watered me. Who would I be without the Silesian Quartet? A pile of dry
leaves. And if such an ensemble, finding itself all of a sudden amidst the
celebrations of its 25th anniversary, approached me with the question if I
would write a piece for the occasion, I could not have answered anything
but: of course, I would! In fact I have been writing a string quartet for a
long time. What I have eventually produced, however, has proved to have no
relation to what I used to write pre-viously. It turns out to have an
affinity with what I first tried to explore in my orchestral piece Tafle
(2003), and what I could call the composed trill technique (I would say that
everyone would arrive at this technique if they attempted to develop a
melodic line in a meticulous and rippling way on a piano with only three
keys – the successive degrees of the semitone scale).
The Quartet is also the continuation of my instrumental technique which was
characteristic of my pieces for strings. In it, unlike in classical playing
in which an audible change of finger is a mistake or mannerism, a change of
finger and of the position of the hand on the fingerboard in legato playing
is a deliberate audible effect. In the Quartet (as in my previous
compositions for strings) I demand an entirely new approach from the
performer. His arm never rests but is in continuous movement, while the
fingers do not seize the sounds but slide over them, rebounding from the
strings and the finger board in a manner similar to a hovercraft bouncing
off the water or
a skier racing down a mogul slope. Despite the fact that I have to my credit
quite a large number of offshoots, applications and musical guises of this
method of playing, I do not use it in my pieces for strings exclusively but
as an extension of the musical language.
I have dedicated the piece to the Silesian Quartet.
Tadeusz Wielecki
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