Greatest Influences on Your Music

So you're not open to new influences then, Maestro?

Fortunately Not. I'm a musical "purist" or less harsh - "traditionalist". To me 20th Century music sounds like organised rubbish ( ) and, I mean well, pop and rock and other "modern" music doesn't count for me.

I'm not sure one can count oneself as an influence... after all, no one sets out to copy another composer, so we're all "influenced" by ourselves enough that it doesn't really count as an influence.

in no particular order

chopin: master of counterpoint... listen to the opening bars of his barcarolle or his berceuse!!! his melodies are also incredibly subtle ( "cello" and Tristesse etudes)

liszt: has some very (weird) interesting stuff... have no name for it.

many more not-so-influential influencers, too many to mention.

I cannot think of a composer of whom I find traces in my music. This is probably because I’m too close to my own works to objectively consider that. Nor can I think of anyone I have genuinely tried to emulate.

I learnt more about setting words for voice and piano from Barbara and Renée Claude’s album of Léo Ferré songs than from Schubert, but that may be because I understand the language. Giya Kancheli has over the course of the past year reminded me of the need for contrast. And Arvo Pärt’s Third Symphony is the only work I can recall that I ever heard and immediately thereafter was really, really ticked off he’d written it, because I wanted to. But my music sounds nothing like theirs that I know of. The only thing I can mention is that a lot of my things for piano end up sounding like Satie ”“ but that’s especially true of the things I wrote before I’d ever heard any Satie.