Born on 5th of July 1954 in Warsaw. Wielecki studied double bass with Alfred Wieczorek and Andrzej Mysiński and composition with Włodzimierz Kotoński at the Warsaw Academy of Music. In 1986 he was granted a Witold Lutosławski scholarship. In the years 1986-87 he continued his composition studies with Isang Yun in West Berlin and Klaus Huber in Freiburg im Breisgau.
As a bassist, Wielecki performs contemporary solo works, giving concerts in a number of European and Asian countries as well as in the United States. His composition Concerto à rebours for violin and orchestra (1998) was listed as one of the recommended works at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1999.
He has also been involved in the promotion of contemporary music and artistic education, leading programs on the new music for children and youth in the Polish Radio. He also collaborated with the Children’s Art Centre of Poznań. In 1992 Wielecki chaired the Artistic Committee of the World's Music Days of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Warsaw. In 2004 he was invited to give lectures during the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music and in 2005 at Florida State University (Tallahassee) he presented his double bass works and modern playing techniques on the instrument, including his own solutions.
Since 1999 Tadeusz Wielecki has been the director of the 'Warsaw Autumn' International Festival of Contemporary Music. In 2008 he was awarded the Polish Composers’ Union’s annual award.
Wielecki is one of the most interesting Polish composers of the middle-aged generation. On the one hand, his attitude to composing is marked by emotional expressiveness. On the other hand, his approach to the process of composing is highly intellectual. A number of his works reveal intellectual experimenting. It goes without saying that Wielecki's compositions are influenced by his experience as a bassist. Wielecki is particularly interested in modifying the traditional technique of playing stringed instruments. In his 1998 Concerto à rebours for violin and orchestra, the composer develops a special method of playing that could be referred to as "sliding". It is about continuous movement, fingers sliding along the strings, as opposed to the traditional technique where fingers are statically placed on the fingerboard of the instrument. According to the composer, this technical innovation has musical consequence as it impacts the sound of music.
A special musical category and, equally, an important element of the composing technique is for Wielecki the "musical gesture". The composer elaborated on it:
Its essence is the dramaturgic indivisibility of a motif, of a musical unit. It is therefore a kind of a musical event, one that cannot be reduced to some very simple form without detriment to its basic function - the function of the element of a musical action. And then it is something that should have the nature of a sign. A mere motif or some abstract music cell will not be a gesture. As a matter of fact, it is about taking the principle of gesture as a body reflex to the territory of musical discourse. The reflex conveys a message, though without words. A man makes a gesture to communicate his feeling about something, his own, innermost truth. Yet a gesture has a musical value in having its own energy, rhythm, tempo, a specific duration. It is feasible to transfer these characteristics to sounds. However - and here we are touching the essence of the issue - these elements also convey expressions and meanings. And since the key aspect of a musical gesture is its distinct and specific character, I can see the gesture-using method of composing opening up opportunities for music which plays with expressions and energies. There is also the possibility to achieve higher plasticity of the music matter and, independently, to give sounds a humanistic sense of a higher degree than the one they have when treated as a pure construction.
Wielecki has put his idea of the musical gesture to practice particularly in his three compositions entitled A Study of the Gesture and composed, respectively, for clarinet, piano and cello (1995), for piano (1997), and for clarinet, trombone, piano, cello and double bass (2000).
In general terms, Wielecki explains the idea of his music in the following way:
My purpose is to relate to the deep, innermost layers of the psyche. When dealing with music, we face the unlimited, the transcendent. A musical, artistic action comes from communicating with another person, but with God, the Absolute, in perspective.
Compositions:
Author: Polish Music Information Center, Polish Composers' Union, March 2002. Updated: June 2016, AG.
