Part 2

How much potential for something “new” is there still in composition? What could this “new” look like?

I'll quote one of my previous composition teachers here, Caspar Johannes Walter, with whom I studied only briefly but who had an immense impact on me: there is enormous room for "new," but it's not up to the composer to decide whether something is new — that's up to time, and its own proof.

I strongly believe I can't be preoccupied with making something "new," something never done before — even if I end up doing so, I can't decide that in the creative process and magically make it happen. What I can do is be preoccupied with progress and process — listening, studying, doing, thinking, looking back and ahead — and if something new comes out of that, great, but that's not mine to decide or quote on quote be concerned about too much.

I think about music in a slightly sacred way — and I don't mean that religiously, since that word can carry a lot of weight — but there's something I can't quite put into words, a kind of personal shrine that isn't just for me, but for everyone it concerns. Newness can be a wonderful byproduct, but it's not my main aim.

There's a kind of act of defiance in this, for me, in simply continuing to write, to do, to do, to do. I try to leave it to others — their judgment, their own sense of standard or idea at any given moment — and that feels liberating, and humbling. Others have just as much a say in it as me, and that's the beauty of it.

It is my impression that adding a conceptual, non-musical dimension to one's work is almost a prerequisite for commissions and grants. How do you view this tendency and how “conceptual” is your own approach to writing?

Yes, I definitely feel that way. For me there's a clear hierarchy: if a concept is there, the music needs to be as good as the written description of it. If I read a program note about a piece but then can't hear any of it in the music — if I wouldn't have understood anything about it without having read the note — that misses the point.

Sometimes, for me, a concept is a beautiful framework to fill with music, because it gives a container to the many thoughts, feelings, ideas, and timbres we might carry in our inner space for a long time — it acts as a kind of catalyst, which I find beautiful.

I've often felt that if I write music with a specific poetic thought, construct, preoccupation, or concept in mind, I'm more satisfied with the result once it's finished. But I also believe that the framework of "needing" such a thing can quickly become a kind of strange bullshit-meter. Sometimes music just comes out — that's its beauty, its impromptu nature.

I think there needs to be a well-defined balance. The most beautiful act, for me, is to try to know what you want to say, and then try to express it as beautifully as possible in the music.

Working with long forms, complex concepts or new vocabulary is potentially more challenging today because they require us to remember things that happened perhaps minutes ago – while most of us are finding it hard to focus even on what's happening right now. Both as a composer and as a listener yourself, how do you deal with this?

I get worried when I notice my life has recently become dense with many small things — administrative tasks, mostly, that have a lot to do with technology and the computer and short, compact bits of information — and I feel my attention span shrinking.

Whenever I catch that happening, I try to engage in activities that require a longer attention span, and I train my concentration. It's something that matters a lot to me: reading long books, going to concerts outside my usual zone, listening to a speaker on a topic I don't know much about while trying to stay focused and follow along.

I don't always manage it. But I do believe it's important to train this muscle, since I think it's almost unavoidable to get pulled, from time to time, into short attention spans with little sustained focus.

How, would you say are live performances of your music and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?

What I love about having different projects is exactly this: some feel, for me, like they happen inside my tiny room, at the desk, at the piano, looking at a blank page — and then so much "internal cinema" happens, influenced by both the inside and the outside. But then I need the other aspect too — the live experience, the playing, the energy, especially listening to my fellow musicians playing together while I'm on stage with them. That's always a cathartic experience.

Every time, I'm reminded — in a slightly naïve way — of what it's all about. They're like two poles for me, that live and work with and from each other; without one, the other wouldn't exist.

There's one piece on the album, "Loop Piece," that really lived off the experience of learning it together with the ensemble, of hearing it played while being gifted a body and a space — only then did the piece make sense. I'm so grateful for that.

On the page alone, it was missing something. I imagined the performance would give it its true life, but you can only guess until you actually hear it. I'm so grateful to the wonderful musicians in this ensemble who gift me their time and trust, who go along with what sometimes seems "off" or "weird" at first — it's very humbling to witness that.

To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

I really resonate with and align with Brad Mehldau's view on this one — can I just redirect this question and answer with a link to his Substack?

The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feels it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?

I do feel there's a kind of promise and intention for future generations in the act of preserving — an almost unquestionable love and care for them. Which is why I find museums and archives so fascinating. Someone — many someones — went completely out of their way to make so many individual pieces of art, of science. These are all tiny, or grand, acts of humanity, and I find that so moving.

I was listening to a podcast some years ago, I believe it was To the Best of Our Knowledge from NPR, with an episode about the largest seed archive in the world, in Norway — a "seed vault." Seed banking is the long-term storage of seeds to preserve plant genetic diversity. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault sits halfway between Norway and the North Pole, where the ground has been frozen for thousands of years and the light disappears for months at a time. On the shelves: more than a million seed varieties in foil packets, from nearly every country on earth. Crops from war zones. Plants from islands that are sinking. Varieties that exist nowhere else.

No one lives there. It was designed to need as little human intervention as possible, because the point is that it has to outlast us, whatever comes next. A seed is already a kind of patience — it knows how to wait. The vault just extends that waiting, ten years, a hundred, longer, until someone needs what it holds. And someone will. That's the quiet certainty behind all of it. Not panic, not despair — just the steady belief that the future will want what we almost lost, and that it's worth keeping the door open.

Back to your question: when I experience something, I want to be fully present, so I can store it in my own memory — the feeling, the smell, the season, the chord progression, the singer's vibrato. No phones, that's what I like.

But if I think beyond myself, I do feel there's something incredibly beautiful in the conservation of things — whether it's music, science, poetry, 14th-century instruments, Mahler's baton, Anne Frank's diary, an anonymous grandmother singing folk songs in her kitchen in Romania in the '30s, Bon Iver's concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2019.