What follows is a moving document, a no-holds-barred confession by a composer who writes music even if it puts him at a considerable disadvantage compared to some of his colleagues of the international avant-garde.

In preparing the German edition of my Three Questions book, I invited Detlev Glanert to contribute to the project and asked for a selection of recordings. I was impressed by his music and described it in my introduction in my own subjective manner, relying on the associations it had evoked. Natural images emerged in my mind, trees, clouds, birds, and the wind.

Glanert asked me to delete those references, for he feared they would reinforce the misconceptions his aesthetic sometimes evoked, that might cause his music to be falsely seen as program music. I complied and rewrote the entire introduction.

Detlev Glanert would be the ideal composer to interview about courage and the tyranny of taste, I thought, and his contribution has confirmed my assumption. Taste and prejudice can obviously still exercise a tyranny of their own and a composer like Glanert needs courage—obsession—to go on composing the way he is convinced is his own.

February 2016

In view of what is happening in the world today, it appears frivolous to describe aesthetic decisions by composers with the word courage. Rather, it takes obstinacy to overcome resistance, to face controversy, and to embark on a path that may turn out to be lonesome. Also, to ignore opposition and detractors.

Most composers—indeed, most people in general—are not particularly courageous and are beset by all kinds of anxieties, especially about pain, failure, humiliation. Courage (obstinacy) means perhaps to go on composing regardless of such uninviting prospects.

Naturally, one works in the face of expectations and prejudices. Nowadays, you need as much—or as little—courage to set up taboos as you did in the past to break them. What really is remarkable, to my mind, is that one should stick to one's way nevertheless: that is, create new music that will only appeal to a very small group of people; music that requires a great deal of effort and expense to be performed and will in most cases not make enough money for the composer to live on.