BD: Let me ask a very easy question. What’s the purpose of music?
KP: For me, it’s just communication with people, because it’s the only way I can communicate easily. This is my profession. I am writing music since I was six or seven. I do not want to say that I wanted to find the audience because in the beginning, I wanted to write against the audience, even, in my early pieces. But those pieces written in the sixties were played, and I found an audience, and I found the people that were interested in this music, so I think it’s very important writing music which somebody understands.
BD: Even though you were using new language and forced them to learn your new language?
KP: Yes, but I think the audience is very open, usually, the good audience. I can always... [short pause] surprise the audience.
BD: Is that very important, to surprise us each time?
KP: Yes, because I don’t like that somebody will say that I am a composer who is just writing the same pieces in the same musical language. I think it must be very boring to write the same thing for the whole life. There are some artists who are doing this, just like some painters. Chagall is a great painter, but all that he was doing was not much different, you know. In his painting, from the very beginning almost to the end, there is, of course, evolution, but he was never revolutionary like Picasso. Picasso interests me much more because he was always looking for something different, sometimes going back, having an affair with Velasquez, but it was always Picasso.
BD: So you don’t find it as satisfying to explore more deeply the older form or what you have done before?
KP: There are several periods in my music. You can see that after I would write four or five pieces, they are always better and better. But then I’m going another way because I get bored to write the same thing.
BD: And you don’t want the audience to be bored?
KP: No, no. I have to satisfy myself first, not the audience.
BD: Does your music always satisfy you?
KP: Yes. I wrote a lot, but I’m writing slow, very slow, and even slower now. But I’m writing every day, all my life. I am sixty-six now, and sixty years I’m writing music.
BD: Every day?
KP: Every day, yes. Even when I’m traveling, I am writing.
BD: Are you ever surprised at what you see going down on the page?
KP: No, because I imagine music before I am writing.
BD: Then are you really just transcribing it?
KP: Yes, yes. I wouldn’t just see it in the empty piece of paper and try to put some notes together or chords together. No, no, no. I have the clear concept. As a matter of fact, because I am writing every day, there is always continuation of something I did before.
BD: In each piece, or from piece to piece also?
KP: Also from piece to piece, of course, yes.
BD: Are each of these pieces exploring different aspects of you?
KP: That, I don’t know. I’m always fascinated by form first. What concerns me is really not writing, because I can write. After so many years, there is no problem. But I need to find the form and to find the shape of the piece. I am never writing from the beginning to the end. I am always starting in at some point, making a lot of sketches which are graphical, not always with the music, with the notes, no. And after I have a very clear concept of the form, then I am really starting to write, but even then, never from the beginning to the end but always from the middle. And then I am going to the left and right, both sides.
BD: Like throwing a stone in the water and watching the ripples go out?
KP: Yes, yes. I am always building the form from the heart.
BD: From the heart, radiating out.
KP Yes.
BD: When you’re working on it and you’re tinkering and you’re getting everything right, and you’re putting things down, how do you know when you’ve finished?
KP: There is something like instinct, I think, that a composer, the artist, must have. It's important to know exactly, because there are thousands or hundred of thousands of possibilities. You have to find the right solution and to know exactly where to finish the piece.
BD: Is your solution always the right one?
KP: If not, I wouldn’t give out my piece. Of course not. I would keep the piece then. Some pieces I still have unfinished, or maybe some ideas, and sometimes I am using the fragments of them, of my thoughts, in another piece. But I think I have always more ideas than I need, so I am not using all the ideas in one piece.
BD: So part of your task, then, is selecting which ideas go in which piece?
KP: I think the process of composition, of writing music, is like crystallization of something, from the very small idea, very simple, to very complicated, from the nucleus of the motif to the bigger form.
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