At that time the list of his works did not contain many items – an arrangement of Bach’s Chorale Preludes for orchestra, a song cycle to words by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Krągły rok, and the Five Preludes, which the composer used as thematic material for his new orchestral work. This is how he described it:

The Third Symphony is composed of many elements taken from my Five Preludes for string quartet with piano. I sought to merge these elements – highlighted separately in this small cycle – into one story. Because for me music is always a narrative, a monologue, dialogue or multi-voice structure accompanied by rhythms and colours. Yet, the ‘core’ of this art is melos, a theme, a ‘horizontal element’. However, I have abandoned any repeatability, which has formed our music for several hundred years. Other strict rules I imposed on myself are to ensure unity for my symphony (Mycielski’s commentary from the programme booklet of the 1972 Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, pp. 155–156).

The unity of sound in the symphony is obviously a result of the sound material being anchored in meticulously organised tables with twelve-note rows, which Mycielski expands in successive textural planes, completing the spectrum of sounds to make the full chromatic scale. Changeability – dialogue, story-telling emphasised by the composer – occurs not only in the varied material of the chamber Preludes (IV and V), but above all in the colourful organism of the orchestra, used to the full. The result is an “interesting and individual sound world: impressionistic, with a touch of nostalgia, at times remarkably lyrical and at the same time one with a vivid rhythmic outline” (Beata Bolesławska-Lewandowska, from a forthcoming monograph devoted to Zygmunt Mycielski).