BD: Do we have ocarina virtuosi that you can call on?
KP: No. I was using a kind of jazz for the sound, like the cluster of ocarinas, not a special thing.
BD: Can we look forward to an Ocarina Concerto from you?
KP: No, no, no. [Laughter.]
BD: Do you really feel that you and all the other composers have played out the possibilities of the old instruments?
KP: I can only talk about myself, of course. What I see now and for about thirty years, nothing has moved in the avant-garde. We pushed music so far in the sixties that even for myself, for me, I closed the door behind me, because there was no way to do anything more than I have done. The pieces like Polymorphia, like Fluorescences, like Threnody, and since that time, nobody did music which is more progressive. Nobody wrote something fresh and new for the strings.
BD: Have you’ve backed off of that and gone off in another direction?
KP: I think there is the period which I finished. I wrote several pieces in the late fifties and the beginning of the sixties when I decided that there is no way that I can move on. I was not interested to repeat myself. Of course, I could write a hundred threnodies, and I didn’t want to. This is like the sample, the piece which gave the possibility for the other. Of course, many composers were trying to do the same, but as I said before, there is a certain limitation you cannot go over.
BD: Are you pleased, though, when these pieces are still performed twenty and thirty years later?
KP: Oh, yes, of course. I am conducting these pieces. But after more than forty years, it’s still very difficult music for the musician.
BD: Does it please you that they can cope with it much better now than they did before? Or am I assuming too much?
KP: No, no, I don’t think so. Orchestra musicians don’t like to do something which they didn’t learn in the school, and if you bring something completely new, there is always problem. I not only developed new techniques for the strings, but also I developed new notation, and this was maybe too much.
BD: Are you encouraging these new techniques be taught in the schools?
KP: Of course. In eastern Europe, every musician starting violin knows this technique because they were studying mymusic.
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BD: When you’re sitting down writing a new piece of music, whom do you have in mind? Do you have the audience in mind? Do you have the performers in mind, yourself in mind? Who is in your mind?
KP: I would say I am writing for myself first. But of course I have in mind the musicians that are going to play my music. Yes, the audience, of course, but I’m not writing very easy music, so I am not writing for everybody. If I have in mind the audience, it’s a very good audience who is going to understand the classical styles. And then I think there is no problem for such people who go every week to the concert to understand my music, because I think my music is just a continuation, with some small revolution, especially in the beginning.
BD: Do you still consider yourself a revolutionary?
KP: Yes, but I don’t believe in permanent revolution like Trotsky wanted to have [Laughter.] You know what happened to him and to all the revolution. After the revolution, the counter-revolution is coming.
BD: Are you part of your own counter-revolution, or are you trying to hold on to something?
KP: Sometimes, searching for something different, I have to write against myself as well. I’m moving in a different direction. It has to be different. There has to be against.
BD: Is there ever a time when you don’t come up with the ideas that you want?
KP: Every day. [Laughter.] Every day, writing something, I have to fight with myself, because I’m always looking for something new. I don’t like to repeat myself. I want always to find something which is fresh.
BD. Is it something completely new, or is it an outgrowth of what you've been doing?
KP: There is no way to do something completely new. I did once. My early pieces were really different and new, completely new, even different from the avant-garde, the so-called western avant-garde. I’m talking about the fifties and sixties.
BD: We keep talking about the fifties and sixties, but obviously you kept writing in the seventies and eighties and nineties. Tell me a little bit about the music as it evolved toward the end of the century.
KP: Of course my music has changed, but this did not happen from one day to another or one week to another. It was a longer process. After I finished the pieces in ’62, I wrote Fluorescences, a decadent piece for the orchestra, destroying really the classical orchestra, and then it was clear for me there is no way to continue. I had to go to find other ways to write music, so I wrote Stabat Mater, which goes back to the sixteenth-century polyphony, combined, of course, with all my experience in the studio and experience with the human voice. Then I wrote several pieces, like the St. Luke Passion.
If I would write only pieces like Threnody, I wouldn’t be able to write the St. Luke Passion, which is a longer piece. The early experimental pieces were short. They were seven, eight minutes, like the string quartets, like the older pieces for strings. They were very short pieces. So I was dreaming to write the big oratorio. I wanted to do that very much, but I knew that with this kind of technique, I would never be able to write a longer piece, or an important piece. I was studying the sixteenth-century counterpoint, because I once did it in school, and I found a way to write different music. This was the first time that I really changed my style, having all this experience. In the St. Luke Passion you can find everything which I have done in the early sixties and late fifties. Then after finishing a couple of pieces like Utrenja, again, it was not enough for me. I wanted to experiment with the tradition. So I rediscovered the post-Romanticism, especially Bruckner, and I wrote several pieces under that influence.
One of the pieces which I wrote in the middle of seventies was Paradise Lost for the Chicago Lyric Opera. Also the Second Symphony and the First Violin Concerto. All those pieces were written in a very short time, between ’74, ’75 and ’82, maybe. And it’s very clear that I’m trying to continue this tradition, this Romantic tradition.
It’s not only me. If you look at twentieth-century symphonic music, Shostakovich, for example, is doing the same. He was continuing Mahler, really. My music, I think, goes more in that direction than the direction of Bruckner, I would say. There’s maybe not much from Bruckner in my music, but this was the concept of the symphony which inspired me very much, but also as well as Shostakovich. I am not a musicologist. I am not analyzing my own music, but there is the question everybody is asking me: “Why did you change? Why didn’t you continue the same music which was written in the fifties and sixties?” I am always saying: “Because I said everything in this idiom. I didn’t want to be my own epigone.”
BD: So now you are still saying what you want to say but in a different idiom?
KP: Yes. And in the last, maybe almost twenty years, I think my music is more or less the synthesis. There are still elements from my early music because this was a very important period for me, this time of discovery. But my music is just different. I think it’s mature. I’m almost writing only the big forms. Even the Second Violin Concerto, is a large piece. It’s a one-movement piece, but it’s forty-minutes. And my symphonies... I think my task is to finish my symphonies, because as far as oratorio is concerned, I think that with Credo I wrote everything. Maybe I will go back someday and continue, maybe write another piece, maybe another passion, but I wrote almost seven oratorios. I think it’s enough for one life. [Laughter.] And I am more and more now interested in chamber music. This last year, I spent writing chamber music. I wrote the sonata for Anne-Sophie Mutter, Sonata for Violin and Piano.
BD: Will there be more string quartets?
KP: Yes, but now I am working on a sextet, not a very typical sextet. It’s for violin, viola, cello, piano, clarinet and French horn.
BD: Ah! Interesting mixture.
KP: Yes, I think so. It’s commissioned by the Musikverein, Vienna, and it will be performed in June.
BD: I assume you get many, many more commissions than you can handle. How do you decide yes or no?
KP: I am taking more commissions than I really am able to write, but this keeps me in form, writing every day. I must have it. I know that it is impossible to finish everything, but I would take the commission. But also, of course, I am deciding what kind of piece I am writing. I wouldn’t write a piece because of somebody asking me for some strange combination, no. I’m writing myself, and I will continue I will finish my ninth symphony, and then I will decide if I’m going beyond nine or not.
BD: [Laughter.] So it will be your decision?
KP: Yes. Maybe not.
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