ABSTRACT As Charles Bodman Rae has shown, Witold Lutosławski often writes melodies using just two interval classes, a technique Bodman Rae calls ‘interval pairing’ (1992, among others). Taking Bodman Rae's work as a point of departure, this study invokes the Tonnetz as a means for interpreting Lutosławski's interval‐pairing melodies. As it shows, these melodies tend to operate within two adjacent ‘tracks’ of a Tonnetz , with the activity along these tracks emerging as two threads of compound melody. Though Lutosławski's various choices of interval pairings create melodies that sound very different from each other, this principle serves as a common thread connecting them and thus accounts for a crucial facet of the composer's musical language.
Stephen C. Brown (Tue,) studied this question.