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Contents Preface v Conversations with: 1. Celso Antunes (2014) – Beyond Frontiers 1 2. Richard Barrett (2014) - Asserting Imaginative Freedom 6 3. John Cage (1990) – Beautiful Music 22 4. Lawrence Casserley (2001) - Of Exploration And Discovery 29 5. Simon Emmerson (2008) – Somewhere Else 41 6. Luc Ferrari (1999) – Freeing Music 47 7. Michael Finnissy (2014) – Translucent Objects 66 8. Jim Franklin (2014) – Between Worlds 79 9. Dame Evelyn Glennie (2014) – One Same Music 91 10. Vinko Globokar (1999) – Communicating Music 109 11. Jonty Harrison (2001) – Expanded Listening 120 12. Jonathan Harvey (1997) - From The Region Of Near-Transcendence 131 13. Folkmar Hein (1999) - The Electronic Studio At The Technical University Of Berlin 164 14. Carol Morgan (1996) – The Piano Music Of Haubenstock-Ramati 176 15. Heloise Ph. Palmer (2015) - Muïesis: Re-Contextualising Performance Practice 188 16. Nuria Schönberg-Nono (1999) – Arnold Schönberg And The Luigi Nono Archives In Venice 197 17. Klaus Schöpp (2014) - The Modern Art Ensemble Of Berlin 208 18. Elliott Sharp (2014) – Utopian Pursuits 216 19. Daniel Teruggi (1997) – Composition At The INA-GRM In Paris 228 20. James Wood (2015) – Rhythm And Magic 246 Index 273 Preface Is there a universal thread that runs through the creative power of all artists? If music is essentially a mystery, is it because its creator is such? I have always been fascinated by the marvels of the human mind, spellbound by the inventive potential of many musicians and eager to know how they feel about life and relate to their own work. From the apparent isolation of the composer to the collective activities of performers and conductors, there is a common ground for artistic responsibility that seems to characterise the work of all creative minds. Can this responsibility be meaningfully discussed as an all-inclusive experience of humanity? The British philosopher Roy Bhaskar once pointed out that personalism (the branch of philosophy that considers the person as the ultimate key to the understanding of reality) is “characterized by the attribution of responsibilities to the isolated individual in an abstract, desocialized, deprocessualized, unmediated way.”1 Bhaskar’s assertion seems to be particularly relevant when transferred onto the realm of musical creativity. Indeed, isolation typifies the social condition in which composers come to terms with their “responsibilities”. I have already argued about abstraction as being a necessary vehicle for musical creativity,2 about the pulse of artistic inventiveness breathing out of the musician’s personal experience of the world, and referred to a musical work as an epitome of the composer’s awareness of existence.3 Musical knowledge is more than the performance information that is entailed in the analysis of a score. A heartfelt discussion with a musician can generate unparalleled knowledge of the musical work, prompt alternative discoveries about artistic creation and trigger a new awareness of the world through the shared experience of others. Furthermore, such discussion may shed light on two fundamental truths: that the enigmatic nature of music is inherent in the personal dimension of the musician; and that in spite of our idiosyncrasies, we 1 Bhaskar, Roy. Dialectic the Pulse of Freedom. Verso, London, 1993: 265. 2 Palmer, John. Perceptual Abstraction and Electroacoustic Composition. Seamus Journal, USA, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Fall 1998. 3 Palmer, John. Introduction to ‘Images of the mind’. Published in ‘Musik und Neue Technologie 3, Musik im virtuellen Raum’ (edited by Bernd Enders), Universitätsverlag Rasch, Osnabrück (2000). And: Palmer, John. Conceptual models of interaction: towards a perceptual analysis of interactive composition (1997-8). Seamus Journal, USA, Vol. XIV no. 1, Summer 1999. v are all linked by a common quest and therefore belong to a community of kindred spirits who share the same passion for the same art. On that note, I perceive the history of music as a mirror of a living reality that is not only related to social and political events as “mediating” conditions, but also connected at all times to artistic insight, emotional impulse and philosophical inquiry as “processing forces” that inspire creative minds to write, perform and even to promote music! It is this living reality of music that I was interested to discuss with other musicians. This book comprises 20 conversations conducted over a timespan of 25 years, from 1990 to 2015. I prefer to call them conversations rather than “interviews”, as I believe they reflect the spirit that characterises the dialogue: these are discussions between fellow musicians and musical friends. Initially they were prompted by a desire to gain a better understanding of the personal universe of some composers whose work had inspired me in the 1980s and 1990s. It goes without saying that the focus on composers was related to my own compositional interests and activities: from the unequalled personalities of John Cage and Luc Ferrari, and the existential quest of Jonathan Harvey and James Wood to the unique reality of composer-performers such as Vinko Globokar, Jim Franklin, Elliott Sharp, Michael Finnissy, Richard Barrett, and the magic of the electroacoustic universes of Lawrence Casserley, Jonty Harrison and Simon Emmerson. But a living reality of music is bound to include a more wide-ranging profile of musicians: performers, conductors, researchers and even curators whose visionary approach to performance practices and whose lifelong dedication to the promotion of new musical traditions needed to be included in the discussion. From Carol Morgan’s single-minded focus on the piano music by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati to the passionate work of conductor Celso Antunes; from Pierre Schaeffer’s legacy at the INA-GRM in Paris (Daniel Teruggi) to the long-standing mission of the Electronic Studio of the Technical University in Berlin (Folkmar Hein); from the zealous commitment of the Modern Art Ensemble of Berlin (Klaus Schöpp) to the mesmerising world of Dame Evelyn Glennie, the revealing muïetic performances of Heloise Ph. Palmer, and, not least, the dual legacy of Nuria Schönberg-Nono including the Luigi Nono Archives in Venice. The conversations can be grouped into two periods: the first period ranges from 1990 (John Cage) to 2001 (Jonty Harrison) and the second period, from 2008 (Simon Emmerson) to 2015 (James Wood). Most of vi the early conversations are face-to-face discussions that I recorded and transcribed on paper later on. When working on the written texts I have kept the spontaneous qualities that characterised these early conversations. With the growing advantage of email correspondence I conducted the second group of conversations in a written form; I guess the readers will easily identify the more framed quality of these late discussions. On a more editorial note, I am delighted to reveal that the conversation with John Cage has been published here for the first time. This is because in all these years the original record of the conversation had got lost in the somewhat congested Vision Archives and was found only recently. I am equally pleased to issue the unabridged original conversations with Jonathan Harvey (1997), the longest discussion in this book, and Luc Ferrari. Unabridged are also the other conversations that had been previously published and edited elsewhere. Sadly, by the time of this publication three of the protagonists of this book are no longer with us: John Cage died in 1992, Luc Ferrari in 2005 and Jonathan Harvey in 2012. Last but not least, I am very grateful to all the participants to this project for their generous collaboration without which this book would have not come to fruition. I am indebted to Dr Birte Twisselmann for her enthusiastic commitment to this project and the patient provision of editorial advice. I express my thanks to Dan Goren for his graphic work and valuable collaboration. I also wish to acknowledge the following music journals for their kind permission to republish some conversations included in this book: Avant (UK), Living Music (USA), Mitteilungen (Germany), SAN Journal of Electroacoustic Music (UK), Tempo (UK), 20th Century Music (USA), 21st Century Music (USA). vii viii 2. Asserting Imaginative Freedom (2014) A conversation with Richard Barrett JP. Your musical training is rather unusual. You actually graduated in genetics and microbiology from University College London in 1980 and began to study composition with Peter Wiegold after your graduation. You were 21. What was going on in your mind at that time? How would you explain such a drastic change of direction from science to an artistic discipline? And why music in particular? How important had music been in your life up to that point? RB. It had been centrally important since my early teens, but meeting Peter (just a couple of weeks after I graduated) turned out to be a catalytic event in this change of direction. Previously I had thought that I’d probably have some sort of scientific career, with my musical activities taking place in my spare time, but in retrospect that would have probably been a compromised and half-hearted sort of way to live. For me, the exploration and communication of the imaginative faculty is one of the most important and valuable things in life, both individually and in society. Of course there are many ways of realising this, including scientific research, but somehow I became more attuned to what you might call a musical way of discovering and understanding things. I do believe in any case that music could be expressing something fundamental about time and memory, to name only these, as well as being a terrain of ontological investigation and speculation, not just for musical creators and performers, but for listeners too; I say this because listening was my first musical activity, from which I was led to composing, partly as a result of frequently looking for something to listen to that accorded with my thoughts and desires, and finding that it didn’t exist.