ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an interview with Wolfgang Rihm took place on 18 November 2000, during the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, at which Rihm was one of the featured composers. The interview was conducted in English, which is not a language which Rihm favours for extended discussion of his compositional processes. Indeed, during an open forum in the 1990s which included Boulez and Berio, and which was documented by Hermann Danuser, Rihm says at one point, after a particularly long exchange with the other participants in English, and when the question is finally addressed directly to him, 'Not in English, please'. As his first statement in the present interview makes clear, he cannot make words describe the 'intimate processes' of composition in English as he can in German. Even though the interview is in English, Rihm's discussion of his compositional processes is at times poetic, often metaphorical, and highly evocative.
