richard barrett
page two

You said that any musical material is possible. Can a composition, with a certain kind of treatment, work with any kind of material, no matter how alien it might be?

Theoretically.  

Surely there must, at the beginning, be a positive choice of material.

Presumably, someone like Cage would have said that anything that happens according to the principles of the piece—the principles of the Variations series, for instance—is okay, that any kind of material forms part of the composition, coming in off the street, off the radio. I have my preferences, things that enter spontaneously into my imagination when I'm thinking about music; I'm not taking my choice from the supermarket shelves, but trying to create my own supermarket, if you like. The example of Stockhausen has always been very important to me, because he was concerned as far as possible, within his historical framework, in reinventing the stuff of music from first principles, and in the fifties and sixties he was doing it with every piece he was writing. Every piece emerges from a different world.

I feel that there's a center to the way I think about music: on the one hand, I'm constantly looking back, trying to work out where it comes from, what it is; on the other, I'm trusting my preferences and in the truth of one's flights of imagination. This gives rise to another tension: that between the proliferation of material and another process trying to put it back into an aural organization. In the first portion of negatives, for instance, there is a rhythmic grid which is very obvious; in straight sixteenth notes in changing tempi. Against this, there are always opposing tendencies which are sprouting out in different directions, eventually obscuring the grid. Every now and again the whole ensemble is gradually pulled back into shape again. Every time it's pulled back, this formal proposition of order seems to hold less and less water; eventually you have a very ordered situation which at the same time, in expressive terms, is very chaotic, since it has lost its raison d'être, it's just floundering around in a waste land, it has nowhere to go. There's an emotional complexity about this which I find very alluring.

Talking about material, Tom Johnson once remarked that American and European composers use the same ideas: the difference between them is that they feel very differently about those same ideas. It's very glib, but on a deeper level it seems to become more and more obvious to me as time goes on. Take Brian Ferneyhough's situation in San Diego, for instance. There are people who produce work of a degree of intricacy very comparable to what he does, but when I hear their music it appears to be done for a completely different reason, which is obscure to me. I feel strongly about the material I use; I have to believe in it, because there's not very much that one can believe in. Something which appears to be true to what I would call the structure of the imagination is something I'm interested in latching on to, and it's something that one feels an almost physical desire for.  

Something prior to the imagination?  

What does the imagination consist of? If you ask John Tavener, he would tell you something very different from what Pierre Boulez would say, to take two extreme examples. As far as I'm concerned, the jury is out on these things.  

How are musicians supposed to approach your very difficult scores?  

Difficulty is not a parameter in itself. I don't sit down and try to write a difficult piece of music. The various notations of intricacies and so on, which are very easy to see in these scores, are the only way I've managed to evolve to express to performing musicians what this music consists of. There may be better ways, but I haven't found them. Getting back to the idea whether one is sure of oneself or not, I think that does have a curious kind of parallel in the way that a performer approaches a work of mine, because various people have said to me that when they look at a score for the first time it doesn't mean anything to them at all; it's very difficult to imagine that this forest of symbols can be realized in sounds that are, in the widest sense, meaningful. I'm not interested in the idea of a music of virtuosity, as in Paganini: obviously difficult music, but the virtuosity of the performance consists in making it sound easy. A lot of what I've said comes down to one thing: the projection of the work process in the work itself. That is the way the imagination works, the way that one's sense of structuring and design and disorder work. Those processes, as it were, are dramatized in the resulting music, and they're also dramatized in the way that the performer will react to the notation and what it notates. In the solo cello piece (Ne songe plus à fuir, 1985-86), for example, there's a muted section in which you can put your fingers in the right places quite easily, yet it always comes out sounding differently. That became obvious when were doing numbers of takes during the recording session for the CD. There are all kinds of adequate and very different aural realizations of that section, since built into the composition is a certain instability. One example is the pitching of certain harmonics that are to be played while two other strings are being played at the same time. Other examples were parameters which I hadn't even thought about. Immediately after a sul tasto passage with the bow very high up towards the fingers, playing three strings, there is normal glissando bowing in the high register. The strings have become sticky from having rosin rubbed over them, and thus the glissandi are very difficult, since the fingers can't slide there easily.  

So the struggle for perfection is more important than any realization of perfection.

But there isn't any perfection there to strive for! There's a striving for something. You can't really say you're striving for failure. The central question is to find out what you are striving for, as a composer, or as a performer, or as a listener, for that matter: a listener follows these sounds and these structures, constantly looking back at the significance of all the elements in combination—which is one way of listening, and not the only one, of course. I often feel that the music is heading towards or circling around an obscure point, and the point remains obscure; I don't expect it will become any less so, and in a way it becomes, as we were saying before, a double failure: you don't even know what you're striving for. One can find plenty of examples of this in Beckett.

I was talking about something you can get lost in; you can't lose yourself in a three-minute song.