To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.
You know, as you compose music, you're just off in your own world. You have no idea where reality is, so to have an idea of what people think is pretty hard.
I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.
To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.
Writing music while caffeinated produces some interesting results. The stimulation basically amplifies my music-production-dependent bi-polarity.
What I can feel the most and what I can remember the most are the melodies I want to write to.
I began to write a kind of waltz and in a little more than an hour I had the theme written.
It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.
I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.
I don't really know what inspires me to write the music I do, but usually, the music will set the tone for the lyrics.
I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
I just really try to stay focused on what the material is wanting to do. My basic assumption is that no one will ever listen to it anyway. It's fidelity to the material. That's my contract: It's me and the material. And if it connects with other people, I'm thrilled.
Our job as composers becomes easy when directors have a good knowledge of music and know exactly what they want.
I would find myself, not necessarily always assigning these little bits of music for here or there, but all of a sudden something would fall into place and it would be exactly that.
In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really 'about.'
Actually, most things I say in public lead more or less directly to my own compositional practice, so I should be careful about generalizing lest they come back to haunt me.
I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.
In serial music, the series itself is seldom audible... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing.
As a composer, I know that all sorts of sounds I hear are making their way into my brain and soul and later sneak into my music.
I tend to get quite close to the songs because I've always been the main songwriter.
I write at the piano, so I write things that fit comfortably under my hands, and I'm not thinking in terms of any specific compositional methods. I'm just seeking sounds.
In the end, our way of writing music is a long process of experimentation. We enjoy the luxury of taking this very seriously and giving it the time that it needs.
I always tend to think that composing is not playing an instrument, composing is having something in your head that's steaming and it has to go out. It has to become sounds and be written. It's an emotion that you can't repress.
