The interview took place in October 1984 in Budapest where Stockhausen was a guest of the new-music festival. Twenty-six years on, I can vividly remember the intensity of the composer’s presence as well as my delight that my questions met with such a ready response. I sensed a thrill at hearing Stockhausen relate his encounter with Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949), for it brought me, I thought, in direct contact with music history.

There also came an unexpected meeting some twenty years later in a hotel restaurant near Donaueschingen where I was a guest of Wolfgang Rihm. Stockhausen, dressed in white, went past our table and stopped to greet his former pupil. I also stood up to shake his hand and mentioned my name. He did not seem to be able to place me and appeared to be convinced that I was someone else. It is a measure of the intensity of his personality and the quiet strength of his conviction that I found myself almost embarrassed not to be the one he took me for. It was but a brief duel— he left and I returned to my chair, rather dizzy.

A couple of years later, the festival Musica in Strasbourg featured an extract from Stockhausen’s monumental music theater work Licht (1977–2002), the complete performance of which takes a whole week. I heard and saw a rather odd ceremony based on a concept I could not quite grasp. It was perplexing more than anything else and a sense of boredom enveloped the hall. Nevertheless, Stockhausen was heartily applauded when it ended and he, once again dressed in what looked like a costume specially designed for him, looked pleased.

I wanted to make sure my translation of the German interview was faithful to the original, so I sent the script to Suzanne Stephens, the American clarinetist who worked with the composer for several decades and is now chair of the Board of Directors of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music. I am grateful to Ms. Stephens for revising the manuscript. (The titles of Stockhausen’s compositions are rendered in block capitals, in accordance with the style adhered to in his books published by DuMont.)

I wrote the Belgian composer early in January 2009, expressing the hope that he would take a look at his replies of 1983. The letter was returned: the address was apparently incomplete. I then found out his e-mail address and sent the letter again, on January 29. He replied early in February, with his message inserted after my first paragraph. In red letters, it said: “Thank you, dear Mr. Varga. I am very ill, irrevocably. All best wishes, hp.”

Pousseur died a month later, on March 6.

I am deeply moved by the very fact that he took the trouble to reply. We had a friendly relationship even though I achieved precious little for those of his compositions which are part of the UE catalogue. I concentrated my efforts on his pioneering music theater piece Votre Faust (1969) based on a libretto by Michel Butor. It is not easy to realize: the singers and the instrumentalists have to learn the music of several strands of the score and the text because it is for the audience to decide what course the action should take—that is, to choose one from among the possibilities offered by the composer and the librettist. The performers must be able to continue whatever the outcome of the vote was, without a moment’s hesitation. I had hoped that at least Pousseur’s eightieth birthday would break the ice, but projected productions were cancelled. He took it all philosophically.

It was always a great pleasure to talk to Pousseur (mainly on the telephone; we only met once, at the railway station in Waterloo, a small town near Brussels, where he lived). I was struck by his intelligence and immense culture: he was a great man. The future will decide whether he was also a great composer.

I.

I have had no experience comparable to Lutosławski’s, but there is no doubt about it: the impressions we receive from music—particular compositions, musicians, or schools of thought—exert a continuing influence on the creative process and nurture it. We may receive such impressions while studying a score but it is live music that makes the strongest impact. It has happened to me as well that in listening to some compositions, including contemporary pieces, I concentrated on what they might contribute to my own work.

The University of Rochester Press published my three interviews with the composer in 2009.34 In my introductions to the conversations, I poured out my love for his music in a rather effusive manner. What is there left for me to say?

In the early 1980s when I was in the middle of collecting material for this book, I also approached him. I forget what his initial reaction was but it is a fact that one day he turned up in my office at Editio Musica Budapest and said he was ready to reply to my questions, as a kind of “hommage à Bálint.” He, a composer of numerous musical homages (and two tributes in writing, in honor and in memory of his friend, György Ligeti) consented to give me what must have been his very first interview, in recognition of my promotional work on behalf of his music.

In the three years that followed, we worked on the text time and again. Kurtág or his wife would ring me to suggest a different phrase, a different order of paragraphs, the omission or addition of sections of the text. Their painstaking effort to chisel at the text to make sure it reflected exactly what the composer meant gave me an idea of the way he worked on his music. I carried out their wishes dutifully and initially with great pleasure—until one day in 1985, I felt I had reached the end of my tether. The Kurtágs gave in and accepted the interview in the form you will find below. This interview has been translated into several languages: for many years, it remained the only one of its kind, the only one to be quoted from if one needed an authentic statement by the composer. It has also been included in the University of Rochester Press Kurtág book of 2009.

By the nature of things, the manuscript had to be brought to a close at one point, but life, Kurtág’s life, has gone on. It has done so with the lessons drawn from his breakdown in November 2007 conveniently (predictably? irresponsibly? happily? alarmingly?) forgotten.

A cofounder of the Budapest New Music Studio in 1970, László Vidovszky’s decision to leave the capital and move to the city of Pécs in the south of the country where he was appointed professor at the university may have contributed to the petering out of the group’s regular activities around 1990.

Vidovszky was a composer in the EMB stable and I met him early on: when I joined the company, I was rather green as far as new music was concerned and I asked if there was anyone who could give me a crash course so that I had some idea of what it was all about.

Someone suggested Vidovszky, twenty-eight years old at the time (I am three years his senior) and he came to my place. The conversation proceeded haltingly and ended without my becoming any wiser. As it turned out in the years to come, not only is Vidovszky an extremely private person, he also has difficulty in expressing his ideas by the spoken word. I remember an occasion in Finland at a press conference arranged by the Kuhmo Festival where I ended up as his mouthpiece, so to speak, for I knew the answers he was unable to articulate.

I cannot claim to have developed any close relationship with László Vidovszky, perhaps I do not even know him to any reasonable degree. But I do admire his music, which has always impressed me with its stunning originality. A Hungarian Satie perhaps? I do not know. In any case, it is no accident that Kurtág should have been influenced by his Autokoncert (1972), a haunting piece of music theater with instruments dropping from the rope on which they were precariously suspended and in doing so, producing a sound. I never heard or saw it but understand it creates an eerie experience.

Living in the provinces and with very little contact outside Hungary, Vidovszky appears to have accepted his isolation. He has performances every now and again in Budapest and Pécs and he is happy with that. A great pity: his music ought to be part of the international consciousness.

“Kagel was not the sort of person one would have expected to die”—a nonsensical remark, perhaps, but those who met the composer, however briefly, would no doubt see what the anonymous author may have meant.

In his music, Mauricio Kagel poked fun at accepted notions and figures of music history. The very title of Mirum for tuba has a tongue-in-cheek quality, as does Variationen ohne Fuge for large orchestra, especially the full title, which goes like this: Variationen ohne Fuge über die “Variationen und Fuge,” über ein Thema von Händel für Klavier op. 24 von Johannes Brahms (1861–62). In English: Variations without Fugue on the “Variations and Fugue” on a Theme by Handel for Piano, Op. 24, by Johannes Brahms (1861–62). The piece has Brahms and Handel make a personal appearance in period costume. I am particularly fond of the title “Unguis incarnatus est,” which has a devoutly liturgical and irrevocably final air about it—when in fact all it means is “ingrown toe nails.” (Composed in 1972, it is “for piano and …”) In his La trahison orale (1981/83), he even went as far as to invoke the Devil. Why did he succumb to Death?

Kagel was someone who seemed entirely sure of himself, as if he had never been plagued by self-doubt, as if he had been perfectly conscious of his place in music history. While most of his colleagues usually display pleasure on receiving a favorable comment on a composition, Kagel would simply agree with you and say “Yes, it is one of my best works.” I remember expressing genuine admiration for his Die Stücke der Windrose (1988/93) for salon orchestra, an extract from which he conducted in Vienna’s Wiener Konzerthaus. He nodded, the serious expression on his face unchanging, and concurred. So he should have, I suppose: why pretend to be grateful for recognition when he knew it was his due?

An addict to sincerity, I decided not to shake his hand following the Austrian premiere of his Sankt-Bach-Passion (1981/85)—I would have found his self-assurance jarring.

I.

Reading books on music has always been more of an immediate inspiration to compose than listening itself. I can still remember an episode that happened back in Argentina:

Henze is one of the major opera composers of the twentieth century. His Boulevard Solitude (1950–74), König Hirsch (1953–56), Elegy for Young Lovers (1959–87), The Young Lord (1964), The English Cat (1980–90), L’Upupa (2000–2003), and others regularly feature on the programs of German (and sometimes also of Austrian) opera houses. I realize that to express an opinion on Hans Werner Henze based solely on my few personal encounters with him, which go back decades, would be grossly unjust. The same goes for his music: I do not know enough of it for me to form a considered judgment. All I can do is to record my disappointment at his decision not to elaborate on the replies he sent me in 1983.

I.

I have not had a similar experience but music by other composers does often influence mine: Machaut and Bach, Monteverdi and Verdi, C. M. von Weber and Alban Berg. This is a continuous dialogue conducted over centuries and that is also what nourishes my musical thinking, that is what my music is born from, and that is to which it owes its characteristic features.

II.

Birdsong, the variety of noises, the wind in nooks of houses and in the foliage of trees, vibrations of the human voice which can be magical but also unbearable, the sound of instruments—I need all that for composing, they are part of my consciousness. The noise of machines, the swears and lies of those in power, the screams of the sufferers, the tortured, the oppressed have induced me to render my music expressive and easy to understand; to resist horror through strict form.

III.

Self-repetition occurs when the artist takes himself too seriously and ritualizes whatever he may have achieved; when he forgets about modesty, his curiosity ebbs away and he becomes useless.

György Ligeti was not the only Hungarian composer to have fled to the West in 1956. However, he was the only one to have established himself as a major figure in contemporary music; indeed, international recognition came to him amazingly fast, with the electronic work Artikulation (1958), and two works for orchestra, Apparitions (1958/59) as well as Atmosphères (1960).

They were followed at regular intervals by further compositions which confirmed his position as a leader of the avant-garde. For his colleagues in Budapest, he became an authority, something of a guru whom they sent their scores for comments. “What did Ligeti say about the piece?” would be a recurring question. One of the composers has presented me with his correspondence with Ligeti, or rather, Ligeti’s letters and cards, which he kept through half a century. They are marked by the endeavor—obvious for an outsider—to tone down the edge of critical remarks, rather to encourage and to find positive aspects he could praise.

Ligeti told me that one of the features that bothered him about the music of his friends in Hungary was that it was well-groomed, rather too beautifully combed, so to speak. He meant “academic” perhaps, where imagination was stymied by a close adherence to rules.

In our first interview recorded in 1970 in Budapest (he had not visited the city since 1956), he described a nocturnal walk near Buda Castle in 1950 when the idea of stationary music had first occurred to him. “I would rather call it a stationary sound combination,” he added. “I did not dare to hope that it would ever become a real composition.”

One wonders, of course, whether he would have written Atmosphères if he had stayed in Budapest. I expect he would have—but he would probably have had to wait decades before hearing it performed. In the absence of a live performance of the music he imagined, his development would have taken a different course.

I sent him the transcript of our interview and he returned it, with fifty-five numbered corrections and changes, almost by return post. This initial contact marked the beginning of a relationship (I dare not call it friendship) which lasted almost to the end of his life.

Like Luciano Berio, Manzoni studied composition at the Milan Conservatory where he was subsequently to teach harmony and counterpoint. In addition, he enrolled at Bocconi University in the same city to devote himself to foreign languages and literature.

It is no wonder, then, that so much of his oeuvre should comprise settings of texts by a wide variety of writers: one of his operas is based on Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1989) (premiered at La Scala, with Robert Wilson directing and Gianni Versace providing the setting and the costumes); for Musica per Inferno di Dante (1995) he engaged the services of a close collaborator of Berio, Edoardo Sanguineti, to write the libretto.

His orchestral compositions, too, frequently employ vocal soloists, to sing words by Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Beckett, or Bruno Maderna. Apparently, Manzoni needs inspiration from the outside, so to speak, to set his creative imagination in train: his purely instrumental compositions are often homages to composers like Varèse or Nono. The same applies to chamber music with settings of Rilke or Emily Dickinson.

Manzoni has kept in close touch with languages on another level as well: he is a noted writer on music and has also translated works by Schoenberg and Adorno into Italian.

I.

I can only recall a few moments which could be likened to Lutosławski’s Cage experience. However, they have not been associated exclusively with contemporary music. They have been evoked by Perotinus, Wagner, and Berg as much as by Ives or Xenakis.

Experiences like that cannot be confined to music alone. I for one have received stronger impulses from certain external and internal impulses of the environment. Most recently, for instance, it was the San Giovanni degli Eremiti church in Palermo which impressed me with its majestic and solemn nave: I could almost hear sounds streaming from the stones. My earliest experience is linked to the Baptistery in Pisa: Giovanni Pisano’s enthralling, almost magical sculptures not only inspired me to hear sounds but also conjured up scenes of music theater.

Finally, many years ago, on a gorgeous autumn afternoon, on the Campidoglio, an intoxicated stupor came over me and it seemed as if the surrounding hills, the Roman palaces and churches were inundating me with sonorities which joined in a fantastic sinfonia, merging with light, colors, space, and movement.

Dieter Schnebel may well be the only composer today who is also an active preacher: he continues to exercise his vocation as a Lutheran theologian on a regular basis at the Johann-Sebastian-Bach Church at Berlin-Lichterfelde. His studies of theology went side by side with those of philosophy and musicology (at Tübingen), and he graduated from the Music Academy at Freiburg im Breisgau in 1952.

It was natural for the young composer to visit Darmstadt and to address himself to experiments with serial music. As he says in his contribution to this book, it was thanks to an encounter with John Cage that he turned in another direction and explored new possibilities inherent in the human voice, texts, and the stage. His works in the field of experimental music theater (which he also taught as a professor at the Berlin Academy of Arts between 1976 and 1995) have established him as a leading figure in German musical life. Foremost among them is Glossolalie (1959/60). I saw a performance of it some time in the 1990s at the Witten Festival and was much impressed by the total unpredictability, originality, and madness of it. After the performance, Schnebel appeared on stage, stocky and priest-like, with a jovial smile on his face, as if to say “Wasn’t it fun? Glad you enjoyed it.”

He is also known as a writer on music, with books on Schubert, Verdi, Wagner, and Webern.

I.

The encounter with Cage’s piano concerto around 1958 and acquaintance with his ideas led, in my case as well, to fundamental changes in my thinking. I owe similar impulses to Luigi Nono (Variazioni canoniche) and Stockhausen (Piano Pieces I–V). And, of course, to Webern, Varèse, and Ives.

II.

Sounds of the environment play a role in several of my compositions (Choralvorspiele I/II 1966/69, Hörfunk/Radiophonium I–V 1969/70). The same is true of nonmusical, “concrete” sounds, in works like Thanatos-Eros (1979/82) for orchestra and human voices or Jowaegerli (1982/83), Alemannian words and pictures after Johann Peter Hebel,57 for vocal and instrumental sounds and percussion. I believe that the sounds of our world—the friendly ones just as much as the hostile ones—constantly affect our music, including my own ___________________ compositional work. In my view, composers are always open to whatever they may be hearing day by day—to sounds around them.

We first met some forty years ago, at the Dartington International Summer School in Devon, England. The place was spectacular. The late fourteenth-century Dartington Hall stands in its own grounds, which include a tiltyard and a walled garden. The Summer School was in those years directed by Sir William Glock (1908–2000), legendary BBC Controller of Music whose passionate advocacy of contemporary composers changed the corporation’s music policy and the profile of the Proms of which he was artistic director.

True to form, the Summer School had several young composers on its staff. It was among a group of them sitting on the lawn that I first caught sight of Birtwistle, John Tavener, and others. Whether Peter Maxwell Davies was with them I can no longer recall: Harry’s and Max’s friendship was crumbling, since they were about to part company as joint heads of the ensemble Pierrot Players (later to be christened the Fires of London).

The first impression one gained of Birtwistle (and this may not have changed since) was of a reserved, unsmiling man who appeared to be pondering ideas which did not seem to be giving him much pleasure. “He is rather dour,” I heard people say.

On closer acquaintance, of course, you realize that he is anything but. A kindhearted and vulnerable man with a warmly resonant, musical voice, Birtwistle is, like any creative person, anxious for his works to find wide acceptance but is just as committed to preserving his integrity. He knows full well that his idiom is not immediately appealing to the uninitiated (“It would be no problem for me to write music easy on the ear,” he told me at the Lucerne Festival where he was featured composer on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2004. He added that he quite consciously stuck nevertheless to the language he felt his own).

We were talking at the end of the interval, about to take our places, to listen to one of his major orchestral compositions, Earth Dances (1985/86). It is a monumental block of primeval power and unless conducted with thorough knowledge of all the score’s intricacies, the music tends to overpower the listener.

For most of the nineteen years I spent with Editio Musica Budapest (EMB) promoting contemporary Hungarian music in the world (1971–90), Sándor Balassa and I were friends.

I had heard from an acquaintance at Hungarian Radio that Balassa, who was employed by the same institution as music producer, composed in his free time and his pieces were quite good. I remember meeting him one day in front of the radio headquarters, dressed in his drab clothes, with a worn briefcase in his hand. “I hear you compose,” I said to him. “Yes,” he said, modestly, with a shrug of his shoulders.

That is how it started. As soon as I had heard a piece of his, I was bowled over and from then on did my very best to make him known in and outside Hungary. A number of prestigious performances and commissions followed: Pierre Boulez conducted Balassa’s Iris on February 6, 1976, (a date I shall never forget) with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. Also featured were Ligeti’s Lontano and Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (with Siegmund Nimsgern and the best Judit I have heard to date: Tatiana Troyanos). Through my good acquaintance with Aaron Copland, I got Balassa a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation. There followed requests from Boston and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. His operas and ensemble pieces also received performances. Over the years, Sándor Balassa became a composer to reckon with; he rose to prominence in Hungary and received some of the highest government decorations. He came frequently to my home and I visited him a number of times in his house at Budakeszi, just outside Budapest.

I warmed to his personality—I found him genuine, sensitive, and modest. I was also attracted by his closeness to nature as well as by his naiveté. Two memories come to mind, both connected with our visit to London (the first one for him), to do with the Hungarian concert of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I took him for a walk in the city and when we came to Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, I noticed he had tears in his eyes. He was simply overwhelmed by the experience of seeing those monuments at close quarters.

Georg Friedrich Haas was born in Graz, a city in the east of Austria, but spent his childhood in the mountainous province of Vorarlberg, on the Swiss border. The landscape and the atmosphere of the place have left a lasting impression on his personality.

The atmosphere was marked not so much by natural beauty in the accepted sense of the word. Rather, Haas experienced the mountains as a menace; he felt closed in by the narrow valley where the sun rarely penetrated. Nature for him represented a dark force.

The composer adds: “Just as important for me was the experience of being an outsider: unlike my younger siblings, I never learned to speak the local Alemannic dialect. Also, I was a Protestant in a predominantly Catholic society.”

Haas has not had an easy time of it as a composer. He speaks openly of the years of “total failure” in trying to make his mark—another experience to leave its imprint on his development, aggravating his pessimistic leanings. Success, when it did gradually emerge, only mitigated his pessimism but could never wholly eliminate it.

It is no wonder, then, that night, darkness, and the loss of illusions should have played such an important role in his oeuvre (such as his Hölderlin-opera Nacht (Night), 1995/98). It was not until quite recently that his music has been illuminated by light.

Light effects, as integral components of a range of his compositions, have featured prominently for quite some time now, designed by artists especially for the music. (in vain, 2000, and particularly Hyperion, a Concerto for Light and Orchestra, 2006). However, light as opposed to darkness first emerged as late as 2006 in Sayaka for percussion and accordion as well as in the piano trio Ins Licht (Into the Light), 2007, written for the farewell concert marking my retirement from Universal Edition.

Georg Friedrich Haas is known and respected internationally as a highly sensitive and imaginative researcher into the inner world of sound. Most of his works (with the notable exception of the Violin Concerto, 1998) make use of microtonality, which the composer has subjected to thorough examination in the wake of Ivan Wyschnegradsky and Alois Hába.

When Tikhon Khrennikov, general secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, visited Budapest, it fell to me to interview him for Hungarian Radio. I was perfectly aware that I was talking to a figure of unparalleled power in Soviet cultural life, a hard-liner, one who was sly enough to keep his position regardless of who happened to be boss in the Kremlin, from Stalin through Khrushchev to Brezhnev. Born in 1913 (a contemporary of Witold Lutosławski), he was appointed to head the Union of Soviet Composers in 1948 and only relinquished the post in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. He died at the age of ninety-four, in 2007.

I was bold enough to provoke him by citing the names of Soviet composers I knew were refusing to toe the party line. Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov were among them. I shall never forget Khrennikov’s reply, nor the tone of his voice: “These composers are not typical examples of true Soviet artists. They do not represent what we regard as genuinely Soviet music. You should rather hear Tishchenko …” and he listed a few more names I can no longer remember.

In other words, Denisov was under a cloud. The conditions under which he was forced to work can be guessed, thanks to reminiscences published by Mstislav Rostropovich and countless others who either managed to defect or had no other choice but to stay in the Soviet Union.

When I met Denisov in Moscow in the late 1970s, life for the cultural opposition had grown somewhat easier. He was allowed, for instance, to publish his compositions in Hungary and even in Austria. I remember seeing him in the company of a director of Universal Edition who wanted to talk to him about the opera L’Ecume des jours, based on the eponymous novel by Boris Vian (1920–59). I think he was pleased to meet us, coming as we did from a part of Europe he may have admired for its freedom. He was quiet and soft-spoken but there was no mistaking his self-confidence.

Despite the thaw in his country, he engaged the services of an acquaintance to deliver the script of his replies by hand.

During the hour or so we spent together, Pierre Schaeffer struck me as a bitter, disillusioned, and relentlessly objective man.

He was disillusioned with the world around him and he was bitter that his fame was based on an achievement he more or less regarded as a by-product: musique concrète had been but an adventure. What really counted for him was a treatise, a summary of his research into the phenomenon of noise—and the book had not been translated into English, so that it could not exert the influence that was its due.

On the other hand, Schaeffer considered that his real calling was fiction writing. His oeuvre as a writer, however, appears to have been quite slim: some essays, biographies, short novels and plays. Perhaps that is why the international encyclopedias of literature that I have consulted take no notice of him. Making an effort to take an objective look at his life, one may conclude that he may well have been disappointed. Nevertheless, he is considered today one of the most influential experimental, electro-acoustic musicians, the first composer to utilize a number of contemporary recording and sampling techniques that are now used worldwide by nearly all record production companies. His collective endeavors are considered milestones in the histories of electronic and experimental music.

In answer to your first question I can briefly say that for me, Bach has been the only composer of any interest, ever since I was twelve years old: it was at that age that I first came across his music. No one else exists for me. As for your second question: noise has been the subject of my research. I did not examine it as a musician; I attempted to find out what was noise all about, what was its interrelationship with music. On a more general level, the relationship between music and all other aural phenomena. And finally: I am quite certain that I do not repeat myself, since I gave up composition some twelve years ago.

Now let us take a look at the three questions once again.

I.

My father was a violinist, my mother was a singer. I have heard music ever since I was a baby. As a child, I played the cello and the piano and was quite successful in solfeggio as well.

Like Iannis Xenakis, who was a close friend, and numerous other composers, Mâche studied with Olivier Messiaen. Unlike any of his colleagues, however, he was the only one (as far as I know) to have obtained a degree in archaeology as well. In addition, he studied classical literature of which he was appointed a professor at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Mâche is also professor of musicology at the University of Strasbourg.

Perhaps under Messiaen’s influence, he turned his attention, among many other things, to ornitho-musicology and has written a study which sets out to demonstrate that birdsongs are organized according to a repetition-transformation principle. As he puts it: One purpose of the book was to “begin to speak of animal musics other than with quotation marks.”51

I.

I can report on two experiences which—while they did not have the dimension of Lutosławski’s—have left deep traces.

One was my encounter with musique concrète in 1955. It was at that time that works by Pierre Henry were released on record. It was not any particular composition that interested me but the new sound world of concrete music.

The other experience occurred by chance: I heard Xenakis’s Metastasis in a German radio broadcast. That will have been in 1957 or 1958. I was a young composer, still rather green, and while I could not yet offer an alternative to serial music with my own works, I felt an antipathy toward serialism which was similar to Xenakis’s. His Metastasis proved for me that there existed a new musical language which had nothing to do with serialism. The significance of that encounter could be likened to that with concrete music.

Xenakis was working toward the same end as Varèse had done and I believe he succeeded in achieving many things where the older composer had failed. When I first heard Metastasis, I had not yet come across Varèse; years later, his ideas related to mass were to make a stronger impact than Xenakis’s researches.

In 1960, I composed a piece which I called Volume. It was scored for orchestra and included elements of concrete music. Volume merged both influences: the sound world of concrete music and the organization of orchestral sounds as suggested by Xenakis.

This interview changed the title of this book literally at the last minute. I had more or less despaired of ever finding the cassette on which I had recorded our conversation, until—as it happens sometimes, mysteriously, inexplicably—it turned up out of the blue when I least expected it. The title reads from now on: Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers.

I met Schnittke at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 1988, that is, two years after the publication of the Hungarian edition of this book. There was no question in my mind, I simply had to grab that unique opportunity. Twenty-two years on, it has now found its place in the American edition.

We conversed in German, which Schnittke spoke fluently, if sometimes haltingly, with perhaps just a trace of Russian accent. Born to a father who came from Frankfurt am Main, Schnittke had spent the years between 1946 and 1948 in Austria, where he began his music education. Hence his command of the language. He remembered those years fondly, with their unforgettable musical experiences, such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Josef Krips, Bruckner’s Eighth under Klemperer, or the Abduction from the Seraglio under Knappertsbusch. He wrote: “I recall a basic music tone, a certain Mozart-Schubert sound, which I carried within me for decades and which was confirmed upon my stay in Austria some thirty years later.”

I remember his slight figure, which even then, ten years before his death, struck me as emaciated, all the more highlighting his eyes, deep-set with an intense glow that radiated his genius as much as it may have mirrored his physical weakness.

I believe I first heard music by Schnittke in the late 1980s at the Prague Spring Festival: his Concert for Chorus (1984/85) with its sumptuous sound took my breath away. It was timeless music of the kind Schnittke talked about in our interview, perhaps music that he “received as a gift,” to quote his own words. Some time later I heard his Moz-Art à la Haydn (1977) for two violins and eleven strings—a haunting experience with gestures of the Baroque conjured up out of context, following a logic I could not quite fathom.

Music was no first choice for Tristan Murail: he opted for Arabic and economics before joining Messiaen’s stable at the age of twenty. His horizons, however, extended well beyond Messiaen’s class: Murail was very much aware of the presence in Paris of Iannis Xenakis and looked also to Giacinto Scelsi as well as György Ligeti for creative impulses.

Like many of his contemporaries in France, Britain, and elsewhere, Murail (together with his friends Gérard Grisey, Michaël Lévinas, Hugues Dufourt, and Philippe Hurel) founded an ensemble to perform their music: L’Itinéraire (1973). Perhaps even more important than performances was their mutual goal of developing a new aesthetic, which derived from their research of the overtone spectrum of sounds. Dufourt’s article of 1979 (published in 1981), “Musique spectrale” gave the movement its name.53

In 1980, the group attended a course at IRCAM and Murail in particular engaged, with the help of the computer, in a thorough exploration of acoustic phenomena. Between 1991 and 1997, he taught composition at the same institution, lectured in Darmstadt and at the Centre Acanthes.

Tristan Murail lives in the United States, where he is a professor of composition at Columbia University.

I.

No doubt about it: during the course of his career, a composer’s thinking undergoes changes, but they rarely occur from one moment to another.

I studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire, together with Gérard Grisey, Didier Denis, and Michaël Lévinas. At that time, almost all my generation composed in a postserial style: the Reihe replaced the idiom of Gabriel Fauré. However, the institution itself did not change—it retained its conservative, academic spirit.

I felt I had reached an impasse. I wanted to start from scratch, to begin with point zero. I longed for clear harmonic structures, a sound world based on different principles. Even if that endeavor may have been basically intuitive, the example of Ligeti and Xenakis proved most helpful. It did not show me a particular direction of development but it confirmed my choice of path and liberated my thinking.

I owe a more radical change to my discovery of electronic tools and computers. They enabled me to evolve models of thinking which nourish my work to this day.