DO YOU HAVE ANY KIND OF "PRINCIPLE AESTHETIC" THAT YOU TEND TO WORK IN FOR YOUR "MAJOR" WORKS?

Well, if that would consist of anything, it would be a sort of post-serial aesthetic that revels in contrasts between extreme complexity and extreme simplicity. I think if you look at my "major" pieces, you will find this contrast exploited often. I guess I like both situations a lot---the sort of wild, multi-layered, overcrowded, dense, "what the @#$% is going on here!? Stop! Wait!! Hold on!!" kind of aesthetic; and then, and, on the other hand, a more meditative, "listen into the sounds" kind of musical state involving very slow, (or often static in many musical parameters) and contemplative musical processes.

WHERE DO THESE TWO STRANDS COME FROM?

Well, I guess my best answer to that is to point to the composers who showed me the possibilities for these musical states. In the former case, (complexity), we have the post-war serial guys, Babbitt over here, and Boulez and later Ferneyhough over the Atlantic; and on the other hand, certain works and ideas of Cage, and recent pieces like John Zorn's Forbidden Fruit that partake of a very disjointed, fragmented gestural language, but through non-serial techniques (such as, (in the Zorn case), improvisation).

In the case of the "simplicity" strand, well, I was totally blown away by discovering Minimalism sometime in my late junior-high-school years. I remember listening to the radio once, and this weird, kind of new-age (but more intense) piece came on, repeating itself for 20 minutes. I was mesmerized for the whole time. I didn't want it to end. Immediately upon hearing the name of the composer after the piece was finished, I forgot it. But that sound stayed with me; I tried to imitate it, I wrote a page of orchestral score, (just a page was as much as I would ever write of the huge, massive, orchestral soundscapes that I planned every so often back then). A year later, I heard it again on the radio, and learned it was Reich's Music for Winds, Strings, and Keyboards. Later, I got into pieces like the Octet and Glass's Music In 12 Parts; these pieces still excite me, and I guess as a composer I like to have a really wide palate of time-control available to me---I like the idea that a piece could swing wildly, from massively dense and fast, to, suddenly, incredibly slow (or "vertical time" as Jonathan Kramer calls it in his idea-full book The Time of Music) perhaps for an almost inordinate length of time.

The other strong influence in this direction was Morton Feldman; I discovered first The Viola In My Life, in highschool, and later many other great works of his. In fact, Feldman's surface probably had far more of a direct influence on my surface than the minimalists did. In a certain sense, at least from my point of view, I think he is probably the composer whose influence can be heard the most directly in my music. Also, the way he spoke about form ( "flat surface" devoid of climactic waves), the sort of "stream-of-consciousness" way of composing, the vast length of his works, and the way, in the midst of long Feldman pieces, you suddenly "tune in" after inevitably drifting off, "tune in" to some texture that suddenly entrances you with it's beauty; like you've suddenly "woken up" in a new world----these things were all important formal, aesthetic and philosophical issues that went into forming my musical persona.

WHAT IS MUSIC? WHAT IS IT'S PURPOSE?

In today's pluralistic atmosphere, most people agree that music's purpose depends on who's listening, composing and/or performing. I don't believe in an "ultimate purpose" for art. I'm very hesitant to divide musics into "high" and "low" (and perhaps "useless") categories openly, if only because I (probably all of us) do this unconsciously anyway-- I prefer to accomplish this division, to define my tastes, inductively, if you will, through my listening choices.

As a listener, though, I am intrigued by, one might say, the very idea of taste; to the extent where I go out of my way to listen to music that often at first seems abhorrent to me, simply to learn what it is that makes it so beloved by a certain corner of the population. For more on this, see the middle of my Advice for Listeners New to New Music.

As for what I feel is the "purpose" of a lot of my own music, and a lot of the music (and art in general) I feel most close to, I think it tries to answer the question: "Why the @#$% would anyone want to do *that*?!!"; where "that" is any of the innumerable nooks and crannies of human creative behavior that aren't [currently] "profitable" or "academically accepted" and so on. I love to see people exploring these weird corridors, and forming new musical languages in them. What upsets me is when I meet people who say "I hate that. Nothing good will ever come of that. That's worthless." And they're from both ends of the spectrum, you know: academics on the one hand, taking issue with ideas that may initially seem naive, but in fact offer interesting new musical potential; and, on the other hand, of course, the vast majority of the public, who can't take things that are unfamiliar, that lack pulse, etc., and won't even make an attempt to re-define ideas like "melody" or "rhythm" in their minds to include some way of looking at those musical facets that they've never considered before; and, in general, people who are afraid of being bewildered or confused, or even angered---for a while---at their first contact with new art.

Ultimately, I'd like to think that the purpose of a lot of my music is to explore new and unfamiliar ways of creating ecstatic experiences for the listener---and that by coming to terms with their unfamiliarity, the listener, in some small way, becomes better able, more fully-equipped, to communicate with his/her fellow human beings.

WE'D LIKE TO ASK YOU ANOTHER QUESTION THAT NON-MUSICIANS TYPICALLY ASK OF CONTEMPORARY COMPOSERS, NAMELY, WHETHER YOU WOULD CONSIDER YOURSELF AN "EMOTIONAL" OR AN "INTELLECTUAL" KIND OF COMPOSER?

The two are definitely not, however you define them, mutually exclusive. That question, or at least the person asking it, often implicitly assumes that they are. But let me try to answer the question in that sense in which it is usually meant. Without question, an emotive, visceral contact is and has always been the most important goal of my music. However, often, to achieve this goal in the most powerful--I might even say "direct"--manner, it is necessary to resort to complexities of the compositional process which many label as an "intellectual" approach. I use these as pre-compositional material which my expressive self then has to "fight against" to get through. Often, at least for me, composing [supposedly] directly "from the gut" results in a very weak kind of expression: the expressive strength of music that I produce in this way usually seems to wear off after the 1st hearing or two (if it was ever there to begin with.)

Thus, for me a certain "war" between "gut-expressive" and/or "intuitive" sensibility and "rigorous system," (to put these complex concepts very crudely) is necessary. Brian Ferneyhough elaborated on this opposition 'twixt "system" and "intuition" a bit more eloquently:

I think the use of any structure is. . . to enable one to have a framework within which one can meaningfully work at any given moment . . . it is a state of affairs at any given moment, and if you have worked the systems properly, then you have left yourself enough freedom to be able to react in a totally individual, and spontaneously significant fashion. Structures for me are not there to produce material,; they're there to restrict the situation in which I have to compose.

I believe very much that one has an unformed mass of creative volition. On the other hand, in order to realise the creative potential of this volition one needs to have something for it to react against. And therefore I try to set up one or more (usually many more) grids, or sieves, a system of continually moving sieves . . . .This fundamental indifferentiated mass of volition, of creativity, is necessarily forced to subdivide itself in order to pass.

SO YOU'RE DEFENDING TECHNIQUE, EVEN TO THE POINT OF "MADNESS," BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL THE PIECES FROM THE 50'S AND 60'S, OFTEN POINTED OUT AS EXAMPLES OF TECHNIQUE GONE TOO MAD, OF SYSTEMS BEING REGARDED AS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MUSIC, AND SO ON . . .

Well, I have two responses. First of all, of course, all technique is ultimately in service of writing powerful music. I'm talking about really pushing that partnership as far is it can go with the technique side, so the composer has to muster all of his/her musical/artistic energies to "squeeze" "real music" out of what little room is left over in the artistic space for "musicality" (the room that isn't taken up by technique.) This can fail, perhaps it even usually does, but when it's successful, the result is often very powerful. I admit that that sounds at first like an unpleasant proposition for a way to work as a composer; but the evidence, which includes many of the pieces I find most powerful (and, the pieces of mine that I'm happiest about), definitely points in that direction.

Often (in fact almost always, with varying degrees of truth) the technique itself is advertised as being inherently "musical," so the idea of "squeezing musicality" out of the technique would likely offend it's (the "system's" or technique's) creators (depending on which system or methodology we're talking about.) In other words, for people who come up with compositional systems, often their ultimate goal is to model human musical intuition of one form or another.

As a composer, I'm glad that that hasn't happened yet, because I very much enjoy the process of forcing the supposedly "has-nothing-to-do-with-music" to become "has-something-to-do-with-music."

My second response to your question is that the worst pieces from that time period (50's and 60's) were not, I think, the ones where a composer totally "went off" on some algorithm or system--i.e. where the system "went mad." The worst ones were in fact the one's guided by the attitude you suggest, the "Uh-oh, we've gone too far here, let's pull back the reins a bit here, and let a little traditionalism leak in . . ." kind of attitude. The works that were really obssessed by technique were at the very least, interesting in their musical "side-effects". For example, Boulez' Structures is basically a "technique-demonstration" kind of piece, it's there to show off total-serialism. Most people would agree that in that work, the "system went mad" and "traditionalisms" of any kind were prevented from sneaking in as much as possible. However, it is quite dramatic, whatever musical problems it may have. And at any rate, one probably wouldn't use the word "boring" to describe it---maybe "tiring" or "ugly", but the textures are definitely lively and invigorating.

The bad pieces from that period simply didn't do anything very exciting. They were dissonant enough to be "academically acceptable" but not too dissonant. They had little if any emotional impact, and of course, lacked any ""side effects" of experimentation (of "systems going mad") that might have at least added something pleasantly spicey.

George Rochberg (in Aesthetics of Survival) argues the line you suggest, that the "technique-ist" composers lost their "expressionism", but ultimately, I think he's arguing against all the wimpy student compositions of the period, by people who didn't understand that they had to try to go all of the way.

I mean, can you really argue that Xenakis' music has no emotional impact? Those pieces are written using some fairly hard-core mathematical concepts, and yet they hit you like a wrecking-ball. Maybe your reaction is "Shut that @#$% off!! That's hideous!!", but you have some reaction, nevertheless. . . .

WHAT IS YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARD THE PERFORMER?

Love. The performer is always at least 50% of the musical process, usually more. They have to turn this abstract collection of markings --- pitch, rhythmic, dynamic, miscellaeneous ---- plus, scraps of inherited, osmotically recieved knowledge of articulation --- which we call "style" --- finally into a complete whole gesture, which, when perfectly performed, seems to bear no trace of its origins, those origins being the fact that the whole gesture itself is in fact the crossing of these many parametric streams with each other. That is the final and most important ingredient of music-making. So, the performer is all important. They are, in my view, (and certainly in my music), an active participant in the composing process.

That's why it's so difficult to write computer music, though it seems like it might be easier [than instrumental music], because it's just you, the computer, and the final sound result. The problem is, that to get any kind of musical result, you have to do all of that stuff that a performer would ordinarily do for you, yourself. Let's take an example: let's say you want a computer to do the following

You can't just write an envelope curve for loudness. When you write this gesture for a violinist, lots more happens than just an amplitude change. The first few milliseconds of the sound are not even pitched--just the noise of attack, of the string getting used to the fact that it's supposed to be making a sound. Once a tone emerges, you want it to get softer, suddenly---this again, is not just an amplitude process, but also a process of higher harmonics of the violin's timbre losing energy --- and when you get louder again, that happens in reverse. Plus, all of these processes are subject to constant tiny random variation. The pitch, is wavering around all of the time, almost imperceptibly, but perceptibly enough so that if the ear doesn't hear that happening, it thinks, "ha!! this is fake." It's very hard to fool the ear.

Nowadays, with "physical modeling", which models the physical workings of the instrument iself, rather than the sound, the results are much better---but in a way that misses the point, which is, that the sound itself, even the "simplest" sounds (in terms of what would be easy to notate on a score) are exceedingly complex. Physical modeling deals with this by attacking the problem from a different place---from the "how it's produced" end rather than the "imitate the result" end of things. But that just shows how little we still understand the exact nature of the chaotic complexity of the "result."

I remember watching a cellist playing a tremolo in Derive of Boulez, (there are a lot of tremolos in that piece), I remember watching their bow---everything was changing---the tremolo speed, the pressure, the various angles of the bow, where the bow was in relation to the bridge---all of this stuff, just total complexity just in a simple tremolo.

That's the importance of the performer on the level of the small---the fact that they do all of that almost automatically. But the perfomer does his/her service to music on all levels---making "phrases" of seemingly disconnected notes "work"---I mean, the performer is a real resource for a contemporary composer. We can feel confident that lots of stuff that we're "uncertain" about writing, given a good performance, can be made to "work." Many times, I think, composers haven't really understood what they were writing, and it is the performers who figure that out.

Once I was in this class with a guy who had played Charlie Wourinen music way back in the 60's-70's or whenever. He talked about "puzzling it out intellectually". I thought he meant "figuring out the rows" or the like, but when I asked him, it turned out he meant something quite different---he meant figuring out how to make it "work" "musically"; for example, if there was some complex polyrhythm, how to make that happen between the players (deciding what or who was going to be the "main rhythm" that everyone else's polyrhythm bounces off of, questions like that. Or, 'how do we think of this passage?' if the passage is a bunch of random bits---do we try to connect them somehow? Is one of them the, could it be seen as the "goal" of the passage? Can we make a phrase out of them?) That kind of thought, that performers have to deal with all of the time in new music, I find it much more interesting, in fact, than "figuring out the rows." You can tell by my examples, that I consider the performer to definitely be an active participant in the composing process---the final keystone if you will.

GIVEN THAT YOUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE PERFORMER IS "LOVE," AS YOU SAY, SOME MIGHT ASK WHY YOU "OVERBURDEN" THE PERFORMER WITH NOTATIONAL DIFFICULTY, IN SOME OF YOUR WORKS, (SUCH AS Megalomaniac).

I think the "problems" with my notation disappear, or rather, become exciting challenges to submit onesself to as a performer, when the performer confronts my notation in a certain way. There is a difference between, I guess one might say, approaching my notation as descriptive notation, and approaching it as prescriptive notation. One (descriptive) is about a notation that is trying to describe the exact sonic result as accurately as possible. When one looks closely at the notation system(s) evolved over the course of Western music history, it becomes obvious that the latter is a very bad description of what it does. Our notation is much more prescriptive, in that it is usually telling the player much more about what to do to their instrument, (almost how to "dance" on their instrument) than about how to sound. The translation from one to the other is an assumed tradition held (in the back of the mind) by both composers and performers. Of course, this is a complex matter: our notation involves description and prescription together (in various quantities depending on how one looks at it); and honestly, I love this confused state that notational art is in. It lends the whole situation a bit of mystery; books like Kurt Stone's or the notation essay of James Ingram kind of depress me, really. This whole idea of trying to find a "practical" "standard," I find rather boring. I'm much more fond of books like NOTATION IN NEW MUSIC by Erhard Karkoschka, which features pages and pages pages of the most explosively gorgeous notation.

(Let me also add that, yes, I'm into the idea of notation almost for its own sake: Western musical notation is so beautifully complex with all of its stunning advantages, and all of its embarrassing impracticalities. I love this about it. I certainly get carried away with this in my own notation, and generally I don't regret it. For the conscientious performer, figuring out the musical goal behind the notation is usually not overly difficult; and a notation that may be somewhat impractical, yet is gorgeously suggestive, I think has a positive effect on the ultimate performance. (For example my Improvisation I: Dein Kuss or (as you mention) Megalomaniac))

Hence when people ask me questions like, "Can you really hear those rhythms?" My answer would be that I don't quite understand the question: I write complex rhythms to give the performer some material to deal with, to react with/against, to "squeeze into" a pulse, etc. Not as something I described precisely on paper, and that I wish to hear precisely, mathematically rendered. As I gain more experience with performances of my work, I learn more and more what "prescribed" notations will cause a player to give a result with a given desired rhythmic feel. In a sense, I am learning how to play "mind games" (meant in a non-sinister sense) with the performer.

Returning to the topic of those gorgeous scores in the book by Karkoschka, many will ask, "But if the musical result is good, isn't that just the performer?" Assuredly, the performer is playing a massive part in bringing those things to life. However, don't underestimate the power of notation, of the "look" of different kinds of complexity (or simplicity), of having to "grapple" with a notation, and eventually "overcome" it; all of these things affect the performer in important ways. Hence, the music in question could probably not happen without the score, or without the performer: and isn't that as it should be?

Of course, there is more to developing exciting new kinds of notation than just experimentation in visual art. For, out of new kinds of notation can result new kinds of interactions between performers, new ways that rhythm can go, etc. This I tried to explore, (to take one example) in my State of Emergency: Make Contact with 372 Myriad Galaxies. Many sections of the score are based on different notational ideas---intended to bring about different kinds of rhythm and interaction between the 9 players and the electronics.

Very specific, complex notation, (such as that found in works by Ferneyhough) I think becomes in a certain sense (ironically) almost a forum for improvisation. Because a lot of information is being thrown at the performer, inevitably at times they will have to choose certain gestural or parametric data streams to concentrate on; other concurrent streams will be pushed into the background, (be on "auto-pilot" so to speak); what stream is "in the foreground" is often not made clear by the composer, and hence is "improvised" in a certain sense.

HOW IMPORTANT IS CONSIDERING FORM IN YOUR MUSICAL PROCESS?

Probably form is the most important thing for me personally. Complex musical structures in time and space have always interested me the most of all possible paths to be explored in musical composition. I don't think that form is necessarily a nobler or finer pursuit than, say, the exploration of timbre, or say, finding new pitch/rhythmic grooves, or exploring new harmonies, or what have you; but for me, I'm sure my most important works will always be to a large extent explorations of musical structure.

I was into structures in time since very early childhood, actually. Even before I went into music. When I was a kid I would play and act out scenes with Star Wars action figures and such, and concoct, improvisationally, very complex plotlines, multiple contrapuntal plotlines. I had an instinct for this kind of thing, I think. One thing that helped was that I was kind of the wimp amongst my friends. They would take all of the action figures that were main characters, you know, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, etc. I would be left with these figures that represented characters that only appeared for literally 2 seconds or so in the movie. Random bounty hunters, monsters that appeared in the court of Jabba the Hut, etc. So whereas my friends could (and would) replay the plot lines of the movies, and enjoy their already well-developed characters, I had to make everything from scratch: I had to invent backgrounds and personalities for my guys; to create whole worlds, and new, (probably more interesting) plotlines for them to wander through. So I think this whole experience taught me a lot about creativity.

Perhaps that's why I'm not the kind of guy who spends to much sweat trying to come up with the "perfect" material for a piece. I mean, what is the "perfect" material for a piece? What is perfect or not perfect is the surface: the details that in the final analysis are the music.

Sometimes friends of mine ask me, "I have this idea for a form, do you think it will work?"

Can I really answer that? I mean, you make it work, you can't tell before you've written it all down in detail. Well, you can begin to tell, the more you work it out; but as far as very general ideas for forms go, you can't really say if one is going to work or not. . . .chances are, it's very possible to make it work. . .

Also, for this idea to be true, yes, one must expand one's ideas of what are viable experiences to be had while listening to music . . . what kinds of forms might be valid. I am often interested in pushing the idea of what "works" to the breaking point: I like very much when the form of a musical work seems very fragmented and almost incoherent, and yet, somehow, you can just barely make out the shadow of a familiar formal design behind all of that. I think one really learns a lot from that [listening] experience; also, the related experience of noticing what kinds of "almost familiar" things one "grasps onto for dear life" when listening to something unfamiliar and fragmented. I like the experience of "grasping for dear life" and then indeed "surviving," thinking at the end of it all, "hmmmm . . . .yeah, that actually did kind of work."

I realized I had these ideas in my head as I began to get more and more involved with composing and listening to contemporary music, but perhaps they were most elegantly verbalized for me by a list that Thomas DeLio once came up with of formal desideratum for his musical works:

. . I have tried:

• to replace development and evolution with presentation (both in the macro-form and in the process of the piece): form to be discovered phenomenologically, poised as a possibility
• to rid sound of gesture (both in the macro-form and in the process of the piece): experience is always unfinished--potential
• to straddle the line between order and chaos; to simply find it and stay on it; not go anywhere
• to make all connections as tenuous as possible
• to barely cohere

(from PNM 31 #1)