Q: History has shown us that the turn of a century has a way of bringing with it all manner of artistic upheaval. What changes in music do you see coming in the new century, the new millennium?

That has to do with the change in media, the idea that people will basically get most of their information and entertainment through wall-sized screens and Surround Sound; sound coming to their homes, inside their homes. So I think in terms of information, there have to be artists to fill this, just like there are going to be entertainers to fill it, and I think that a young composer somewhere and a young visual artist probably have to get together and become the new Picasso/Stravinsky duo in the new media. In a sense, music has changed with technological developments. For example, the forte piano was a very limited instrument; you could write Mozart concertos on it, but you certainly couldn’t write Lisztian fireworks on an instrument like that. Not only because of its range, but because the Liszt piano benefited from the Industrial Revolution, from the steel frame construction, and was able to stand the power that Liszt wrote into the music. What came first is the question there. What came first, obviously, is the improvement of an instrument, and what filled the need then was a composer like Liszt or his contemporaries to write for that; and I think that we’re seeing here a situation in which there is going to be a great need for art to fill a room in a new way. That is, a visual art that also has an audio quality to it that is not merely accompaniment but coexists, and I think that’s going to be one of the things that will happen in the millenium.

The other thing is the change of the concert hall, because of the kind of generation that is so visually oriented and because of the lack of education in the history of music. There are going to be generations of young people who are going to grow up [and] want to go to a concert hall; they don’t want to see the back of somebody’s full-dress suit and a bunch of musicians staring into music stands. So the concert is going to change, and how it changes, we will see. I think one way that pop/ rock concerts have done [this] is to have large screens illuminating the faces of the people who are such small dots. That may be one way, but the other way is breaking down this big orchestra into ensembles and getting the people up closer to them interactively. Writing pieces that do that. Writing pieces that use the space of the concert hall in a way that’s inventive so that it isn’t just a box from which the conductor has a single spot he stands in and the orchestra a single spot that they sit in. All that’s going to change. There will be concerts of Beethoven and Mahler, but there will also—within those concerts—be things that will appeal to a younger generation that wants to see things as well as hear things, and be more involved, physically closer, and more directly spoken to. And that, of course, is where the contemporary composer comes in and why I keep saying—although it falls on deaf ears with some orchestras—that what will save classical music will be the composers of today and tomorrow rather than the great composers of the past, because they will not save it. What saves it is the link, and we are the link, the composers…………