What motivates you to create music?
I have observed that even the best music is composed from only one point of view. I always ask myself, "Why not two or three?" Art is precisely the wish to escape this limited subjectivity. How to be more objectively subjective and more subjectively objective? In the idea of the 'variation' is hidden the wish to say the same thing from another point of view. A novelistic attempt to escape this limitation of subjectivity, to view the same subject from different vantage points, was made by Proust: "Today I am not the same person as I will be tomorrow, and what I think today is not exactly what I thought yesterday." How to approach this truth? I want at least to move around the subject, and not to view it from only one angle. The struggle to achieve this can also be seen in painting; it is very strongly present in Rembrandt's self-portraits, as if he is saying: "The subject of this portrait is changing, not only externally, but internally." This has been one of my motivations.
Can you explain further how this idea of 'point of view' affects your conception of music?
If I listen to a piece by Beethoven, the Appassionata, for instance, I think: "Yes, this holds true for Monday afternoon from three to four. But what happens at five o' clock on that Monday? Would he say it the same way? And what will he think about it a year later?"
One angle, whether big or small, is only one angle. Why not more angles? At least to make the effort! With a sculpture, I can move around it. I don't look at just one angle and that's it. That's not the way to look at a sculpture or at another person. How can I say I know a person if I'm with that person for only one minute? No matter how deep that minute is, I cannot pretend or expect to know the full person. It's a very limited angle, no matter how much strength that angle has. But why not make the effort of being with that person for another minute? And on another day? In recent years, I have been composing music as sculpture in sound, approaching the same subject from many different angles. I haven't seen that anyone else has attempted this.