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Tonight you'll perform Ligeti's Piano Concerto. One of the differences between your music and Ligeti's is the presence of the past.

Yes: you must think of his origins. He was born in Hungary and cut off from the world for a long time. Before 1956, he had heard almost nothing new, because everything was banned in Hungary. So he discovered things when he was already 33 or 34. At 33, you are already an adult, really; so he kept this kind of traditional education for a long time. He was also very much influenced by Bartók, as a matter of fact. There is still quite a bit of Bartók there, much more than the influence of the Viennese school. When he approached my group in 1956, I was already 31. So there is always this difference between my music, let's say, or Stockhausen's, and his music. He is attached to another education, to another tradition; and then he chose… Of course, now his vocabulary is much richer than the one with which he began. But I think that he has kept this kind of tie with folklore tradition, and many times I find in a Ligeti work the rhythm to a Romanian or a Bulgarian dance that one finds also in Bartók. But if I may say so, Ligeti's music is nancarrowized, because he was also strongly influenced by Nancarrow. But in general, this notion of tradition is the big difference between my music and his.  

But in your music, the past is there, and it resonates; just in a different way, in a less specific way.

I think I… absorb the past, much more. Maybe that's to exaggerate. I don't like to write something that could have been written by somebody else. That's really maybe the death of me! If I write something, I want that to be exclusively mine. There is influence, yes, but the influence has been so absorbed that you cannot specify it, really. I can see it, because I know the source; and if I tell someone, then they can see a relationship, vaguely. But if I don't say a word, nobody will see it. That's the main thing.  

You have remarked that you have strong affinities—spiritual affinities, I saw written once—with several visual artists and writers. Are there any specific figures in art that you feel work particularly closely to the way you work?  

Yes; but I don't want to be any of these figures! I want to be myself, that's all. I have had contact, really, with some of the best writers in France, especially; but I don't want to be them. I want to be me. But I recognize their influence, especially when I was younger; they had a very strong influence on me. Either René Char, or Michaux, or even people I did not know at all, like Proust, for instance. Or Beckett, whom I never met. But Genet I met quite often.  

When we started talking, you mentioned problems with orchestras and funding. It appears over the last few years to have been getting worse and worse; and a lot of people are afraid that it could seriously damage the orchestra system and, on top of that, the encouragement of young people to become involved in music and composition. Is this a serious problem?  

I think that there are problems with funding, that's absolutely true. But I think that's the bill of listening to music; and the desire to compose music, and the desire to live in a world where art does exist, is really very strong. I will tell you one thing: because I was born in 1925, part of my youth was spent between 1940 and 1944, when times were very bleak, let's say. You had only one thing to look at, that was culture, the theatre, music. And I have never seen concert halls more full than in this period. This vision makes me optimistic, under all circumstances—and we are far from these circumstances. But certainly, barbarian conditions can kill. If you look at Sarajevo right now… I don't know if you heard about the experiences of Susan Sontag. She was in Sarajevo in September, I think it was, and she directed En Attendant Godot, by Beckett, to give some hope to these people; and I thought it was really an extraordinary gesture.

You know, I remember having seen—it was very striking—a piano recital given in a hall in Paris, maybe ten or eight days before the liberation of Paris. So the atmosphere was really tense, and you never knew what could happen; we could have been bombed… Because there was almost no transportation, everyone had to bicycle or walk: there was really a lot of inconvenience… but the hall was full.