Any note I write – even if people accuse me of all kinds of mathematical things – everything I do is only concerned with my heart, or with the heart. When I listen to music I only hear it with my heart. Of course, it goes through the ears and the brain and so on and so on, but if it moves me, well, that’s all. I don’t want to analyse it. Of course, one has to for students and so on but that’s irrelevant, I just want to soak it in. And that is all, surely, that music is about. And so everything that I write comes from my feelings or my experience of life and of living.
It’s getting started that is the difficulty, and almost always I get started through some, well, feeling in my heart, that sounds vague but it means something to me anyway, or something that I see, even something that I smell, but rarely anything that I hear, oddly enough. Once I’ve got started, I’m right. And I am a slow worker, but then to be a composer it’s just sheer hard work.
You have to forget technique or else you maybe just get beyond it, in a sense be as a kind of sieve, although I don’t believe in spiritualism, shall we say, I’ll use the word medium, in that it comes through you in some way. Because if I am being occupied with the technique, somehow the message just will not get across or the heart thing. It’s very hard to explain, and this is why I can’t really talk about method.
I suppose I have lots of little secrets and I suppose that this is why my music always sounds like me, because it has the same faults and the same virtues, if any, whatever kind of piece it may happen to be. This is something that I try to get across to my students, they’ve just got to write and write and write until they can handle notes and juggle them about, and then just forget all about it and abandon themselves to being what they are.
