FORM

How should I put it… is a composition for voices and instruments:  an unconventional radio drama conceived equally as a work for  the stage, complete with video, understated acting, and lighting.  Its ten sections are self-contained, but they form a continuous  dramatic and logical arc.

It is also a “road radio drama,” held together by the recurring  motif of a train journey. Duration: approx. 65 minutes.

GENRE

The work is a philosophical parable: poetic yet ironic, full of gravity yet not without humour.

MESSAGE

But those who feel deeply fall silent. Those who would say what they feel  are left without soul or speech, utterly alone. (Fernando Pessoa, Quadras)

–a holy creature, it wanted to tell you something but what? those who can speak have nothing to say and those with something to say have no way of saying it

(Miron Białoszewski, from the cycle An Excursion to Egypt)

Never can we fully express what we think and feel. And if that is  so, neither can we truly come into being.

Through art, human beings give voice to themselves; perhaps  most directly through music. Yet the truth to be gleaned from it  remains a mystery.

For an artist, the striving “to name each matter by its rightful— word” is a matter of to be or not to be – in an artistic sense, though  not only that: a quest of sorts for the Golden Fleece. In How  should I put it…, the road motif—the train journey—is a metaphor for the voyage to Colchis. The Greek myth of the Argonauts’  quest thus provides a symbolic point of reference for the work as  a whole.

THE TEXTUAL LAYER

It comprises two stories from Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found  in Saragossa, poems by William B. Yeats, Fernando Pessoa, Miron  Białoszewski, and Jarosław Klejnocki, and three texts written by  the composer for specific verbal and musical situations. The composer also selected the texts and wrote the script.

Tadeusz Wielecki