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Peter Graham: the work is never done.

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It's over-dramatised, to my taste, but otherwise quite accurate. I'm simply the messy type whose element is chaos and who manages to lose everything he picks up. That easily explains the number of unfinished things ... And also I've never felt the need to create some sort of "artistic sme" around me (sme is the Brno expression for pretence--here I mean "personality image"). I've never had time for anything like that. It's a fact that I don't make my living by composing, and I have (in the pure sense) quite an amateur attitude to it. It really is fundamentally important to me to do what I enjoy. I don't feel bound by any norms or adherence to some kind of movement. Perhaps I could quote Morton Feldman here: "Every morning I get up and make a revolution against myself ..." I must admit that I'm not much impressed by any kind of clearly defined personal style even when it comes to the great masters--I feel much more comfortable with someone like Wallace Stevens, a poet who adjusts his opinions with every poem.

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Just yesterday I was rung up by the composer Martin Smolka, who wanted me to help him on the piano with some background music for television. When we were chatting about the fee he wittily said that my quality couldn't be expressed in money and that it would be hard to explain to anyone who didn't know me well exactly why I was important ...

I don't know myself.

Pleasure in creation is one thing, but another thing is a definite (even it temporary) satisfaction in what one has created. How important is that "having got it written" feeling for you? Are you spurred on just by the need to compose, or is there also a desire to have actually composed something (brilliant) and at least partly "have it finished"?

That's quite an interesting question! But in fact I don't make that kind of distinction. As a child and in my youth I used to get great pleasure from a finished piece of work--it's really a peculiar feeling, seeing something that started as a sort of vague vision taking material form in the artefact of a score. But the older I get the more I have the feeling that a work is never ready, and that even after finishing the score you have to go on working on it with the performers and then write it anew. And the fact is that I've set aside the majority of my finished pieces for reworking--but when am I going to get round to it ...? So far I've only managed to do so in a very few cases. I hope that the second versions are usually better, but I wouldn't like to say they were the definitive versions. A composition usually takes a very long time to mature. For example I often find myself working up ideas I had when I was still at the conservatory. Even though I quite often write something in a very short period, in most cases it's the result of very long-term thinking before hand, ripening and ideas that have been there for ages. At other times this tends to be balanced by inability to finish off something that started off promisingly just because some kind of "inner note" that leads you into unknown territory has broken off. It could be completed on the basis of logic and a certain technique, but to try and do so doesn't attract me, because knowing everything in advance has very little value for me. For me composing is much less like building a house than like pushing my way through thick jungle or maybe walking with my eyes closed along a rope stretched over a precipice ...

When I think about it, I haven't ever actually "finished" anything. When someone asks me what I've already written, I can't even remember properly. I have a vast heap of paper at home, but it's all just initial experiments, and essentially it's as if I'm starting over time and time again, testing different directions, going back here or there. It's more a kind of "big dance", or to put it better "Brownian movement" that some kind of "movement forward". At all events I see it more in front of me than behind me ...

In front of me I still have a mass of problems that I need to solve. For example one of my big problems is notation. After experimenting with notation in my early period (and finding practically no understanding for it anywhere), I went back to more or less conventional notation, which I use in different variants. The advantage here is that for musically trained performers it offers a certain relatively easy means of communication between us. At the same time, however, it's the source of many misunderstandings, since this type of notation brings with it a certain performance convention that usually I try to steer completely clear of. This means that I'm often oppressed by the sense of the inadequacy of the score, which means that I then have to give extra explanation to the musicians because it doesn't communicate the expressive side of the thing. And I confess that this usually becomes clearer to me myself only when I am faced with musicians' failure to understand. When I write something, everything is clear to me. It seems to me that it's just a question of entirely natural feeling--but the problem is that my feeling is based on influences that are different from the ones to which well-trained musicians have been exposed. My aesthetics are different from the aesthetics in which they have been trained. I would like to find a method of notation that would provide a more precise means of expressing this difference in conception, communicating not just the different character of the notes themselves, but also a certain relaxation in the frame of a whole range of parameters, especially those that are usually considered fundamental, i.e. rhythm and pitch. For the moment I cope with the issue on a piece-by-piece basis and try to work as closely as possible with the performers. The essential condition is getting beyond a purely professional relationship and approaching mutual trust and human proximity. This is why I also give precedence to individuals or small groups. I don't find it easy to imagine how I would manage this with large ensembles and I don't think anyone would have time for it in that kind of situation ...

During or conversations I've already noticed many times that you find the composer--performer relationship complicated and difficult. I remember how you once pregnantly summed the whole problem up by saying that "the composer doesn't communicate with the public, but with the performer". This puts paid to the usual cliche about how the composer communicates something to the public. But don't you think that the mediating role of the performer in conveying the message could be an advantage as well? It means that the composition acquires a certain degree of objectivity, which can't be achieved with the old "folk" method of creation (the composer being performer himself) ...

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When I was young I thought that a performer simply plays a work and that's it. I mean that it's a more or less mechanical matter of trained specialists converting the notation into sound. Experience (and not just my own direct experience, but what I keep observing around me), has driven me to the opposite conclusion, which is that in the overwhelming majority of cases it is the performer who determines whether a piece is successful or not. The best way to grasp the difference between mechanical conversion and real performance is to think of the computer demo-version, where everything is correct, but it's actually unbearable to listen to the thing. This is because performance is always an interpretation of a text--which is what it is interesting! Naturally it's...

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