When we get together from time to time, we talk more about what we read than what we listen to. Or you talk about your art experiences. Where is all the literature and all the visual art in your music? Or isn’t there any?

I don’t know about literature. My reading is haphazard, and while you can certainly find composers whose connection to literature is obvious, I’m probably the complete opposite. I’m interested in visual arts, and since I have no ambition in that field, I can cheerfully indulge in a dilettantish interest, delving into the things that attract me, blithely ignoring what does not, forgetting names, selectively ignoring the internal contradictions and unfortunate circumstances that plague those who professionally engage in the visual arts. I’ve got enough of them in music, but they are quite different, for – and I might be slightly obsessive about this – I hasten to point out that I find almost no real parallels between the visual arts and music: What looks like a promising and seductive analogy, falls apart inexorably upon closer examination; even the relationships in terms of metaphors don’t work very well – instead of clarifying, they obscure the fundamental difference between music and the visual arts. It is true that some paintings (such as those by Jaromír Novotný¹) put me in a pleasant mood for thinking of composing. And I enter the sphere of the visual arts to breathe in a kind of generosity that is more inherent there than in music.

If I have it right, for you as a composer (and perhaps also as a listener?) the autonomy of music, at least art music, is a kind of basic assessment that you have been consciously respecting as a creator.

I’m aware of the difficulty of the concept of autonomy, but yes, my view is that the autonomy of music is possible and I embrace it for my work, base myself in it and stay within it. It follows quite directly from my mental setup – any intermedia situations leave me as a creator completely indifferent. Any switching, transgressing, connecting, crossing, positions “in between”, none of this attracts me, it doesn’t trigger my need to do something. It may sound reactionary at a time when interdisciplinarity and intermedial approaches are perceived as something positive a priori. But I believe that sticking to one medium (or even to one very narrow sphere of it, such as notated music for acoustic instruments) is a value-neutral creative modality – just as much as the opposite strategy. This certainly doesn’t mean that music is something unproblematic for me, on the contrary – it’s problematic to such a point that almost nothing is possible anymore. But the search for another possibility that would allow me to make one more new piece of music is something that happens to me, and it is verified in a context where the autonomy of music is presupposed. It’s not a matter of choice; finding solutions by stepping outside is something unworkable for my nature.

From the point of view of the creative process itself, one can of course rely on a high degree of autonomy in this type of music, but the composer is confronted with heteronomy at the latest at the moment when he wishes to hear his work. What about the caesura between the autonomy of artistic claim and the performance? Do you live in two worlds?

The important thing is that it should be a caesura, not a gap… You would probably not get very far if you considered autonomy to be only a kind of utopian, maximalist condition, and anything that deviated from it would immediately be called heteronomy. It is a scale, not two poles and nothing in between, and the tension between autonomy and heteronomy occurs on different levels – one level of weakening autonomy is that the written music is played by someone, and another level (much more serious for me) is providing the music with words or images, for example. But that is pretty much self-evident. What is more interesting is that there is a kind of implicit assumption of a one-way process: i.e., that the “original,” declared, dreamed-of or whatever autonomy is something that just keeps getting lost, breaking down unsustainably, collapsing under the weight of its own aporias and external inevitabilities, preferably while being mocked by the outside world. But the process can be largely reversible.

How should I imagine such a reversion process?

As long as I am alone with my score, I really exist in a world different from the one I enter when I prepare its first performance with musicians. Yet this transition “from one world to another world” is something I foresee from the very beginning; all is directed towards it and subordinated to it: My scores consider the practicality of realization to a maximum degree, and are unambiguous in terms of what is to be done, what is not to be done, and what the result should be. The fact that they are to be performed by live people physically handling acoustic instruments in a real space is the only reason for the scores’ existence. The possibilities and constraints brought along by my text being realised by other people are a key carrier of the drive for me, and the non-self-evidentness and a certain rarity of this situation is perhaps the fundamental reason why I make music at all. I must say that no other performing art allows for such a degree of “control over the outcome” as music; the precision of the realization of a text can be truly extreme in music, if that is the point, and it indeed is for me. This already indicates that the loss of autonomy resulting from the performance is not such a big deal. However, the fact that the piece has been successfully played is not the end of it. For me, a piece is really finished only when I have a recording that I am happy with. I take it as a proof that the composition works: Yes, this is how it can be, what I wrote is viable, I find it as relevant this morning as I did the night before last, I can let it go. And here’s one possible turning point: The composition seems to “return to itself” through the existence of a good recording. The recording may somehow be lying about the reality of the situation it captures, but by suppressing the physical and irreversible “here and now, just like this,” by generalizing through the purposeful selectivity of the information conveyed (the possibility of corrections!), by being more than anything else a text that has become a sound, it reveals a kind of essential truth about the piece itself, and gives it back much of its autonomy. Concerts are, of course, a beautiful and needful thing, but their stereotypical exalting as the one and only true being of music is asking for a subversive corrective, which I am happy to provide: My peak musical experiences have been associated with concentrated repeated listening to recordings while alone. And please note that the notorious works, which have had countless performances and are available in a multitude of recordings, are constituted in our consciousness as fully autonomous; the interpretation has long ceased to play a role here, it is something external, episodic.

One wonders if the notorious works have acquired their apparent autonomy through a very heteronomous process of becoming notorious… But that’s just an aside. If I launched myself into speculating on whether you are concerned with pure music in the Hanslick spirit, that would probably not be the way to go. I have more of an impression that you are proceeding as a phenomenologist and your music is a kind of Cartesian meditation…

I haven’t held Hanslick in my hands for 20 years, but why not? I remember reading On the Beautiful in Music and feeling intensely that I had nothing to add to that. And if I haven’t misrepresented it, I feel that most of all his writing is a call to restraint – to be more cautious about what we say of things for which we don’t and can’t have evidence. That is what I try to stick to when talking about my compositions. About three days ago, I suddenly felt the certitude that I would not be able to move the piece I was just writing forward in any substantial way until it starts snowing. Heteronomous as hell, right? And that is just the degree of an anecdote that I am still amenable to; in fact, it is worse, much worse: My composing and the resulting music is something very personal to me, and from that perspective it is not “pure music” (and it is Cartesian meditation, among other things). I don’t believe in those famous “questions posed to the medium,” in fact one asks those questions oneself and answers them oneself. The artist’s cliché over a work in the making “I'm trying to figure out what it needs” doesn’t hold up, it doesn’t need anything whatsoever, we do. But what conclusions can be drawn from these personal motives and desires, what importance could they have – for the work, for another person? Why talk about it, and how? I don’t need to profane what is precious to me, and what, at a given moment, has allowed me to create something, just to undermine the future possibilities of my music having meaning for someone else. That indeed is not a win–win. From the listener’s perspective, the autonomy of the finished work (“the purity of the music”) really doesn’t need to be affected, as long as I don’t stand in the way as a blathering dumb-assed composer. Ad Reinhardt says, and so certainly do also other advocates of radical autonomy for the work of art, that what defines the work of art is what the artist refuses to do, what the work of art is not. And that this is also the only thing that can be reasonably discussed. I am not so sure about the latter, but caution is in order.

Do your compositions help you to get at least temporary certainty that writing music is still possible? Where do the doubts and the need to write music come from?

First of all, I would like to clarify: This certainty is indeed only temporary, and concerns only the current composition in the making. Yet at a certain stage it is tangible, it is a reasonably euphoric state in which I sovereignly allow myself not to have any doubts about the meaning of music and art (I know about them, but I don’t have them). The terrible thing is that I really never see beyond one composition, if not even less: When I am not working on anything, my doubts are almost overwhelming, and spill over very disagreeably beyond the sphere of music. I compose less and less, it takes me longer than it used to, there are more and more musical options that have lost any appeal for me (though I may still enjoy hearing them from other composers). The periods when I am “out of work” as a composer, i.e. de facto “I am not,” are getting longer and I perceive them as highly disintegrating for me. So the need is probably to reverse this condition in the only way that I know works – to figure out how I could compose one more piece. I find it extremely difficult (and to be perfectly honest, I feel that it should be difficult for anyone, as there would be less art then, but better art).

The following is from the program note for the piece Diptych, but it applies to my work in general: “I am not interested in creativity, that is picking and choosing from options. Art, as I understand it from my experience, comes about when there is more or less only one option: Yes, this could – after all, suddenly, still – work. Realising this option is accompanied by a threefold state of mind through which I recognize it as such and through which it is confirmed to me: Joy, undoubtedly; wonder, even embarrassment, at where I have actually got to; and the certainty that the discovered possibility cannot be undone, it has already happened, not to write it down would be violence.” The only alternative would probably be if one day I lost interest in music.

October–November 2024