ABSTRACT
I thought to begin perhaps we could talk a bit about the overall sound of your music, and I wondered what is it about drones and sustained textures which interest you as a composer in particular?
It’s about sound and recording I think. I began to really listen to music in 1948 and to listen to recordings and to collect records and in the early 50s. It was exactly the time when LPs came out in 1950 and it was possible to have home hi-fi systems and everything seemed to work together. Tape also, the first tape recorders from the late 40s – so that sound began to be almost immediately much more like the sound you hear when you go to concerts, I mean much more realistic and less canned sounding, and so that was all a big influence on sound. I built my first hi-fi speaker system in 1953 which is still functioning in New York (it sounds great!) My first tape recorder, the first fairly cheap amateur tape recorders came out around about ’53 and so I actually began to work with tape and recording at that time. So the whole business of sound and the reproduction of sound, because my music is very much about reproducing sound in the space which sounds and … well I mean there isn’t really a live sound of my music. It is reproduced sound basically because it comes from recording. That’s the whole idea for me – being able to record sound and to play it back in a way which makes it sound bigger and fuller than it does if it were played live.
