1. 1. Have you had an experience similar to Witold Lutosławski’s: he heard John Cage’s Second Piano Concerto on the radio—an encounter which changed his musical thinking and ushered in a new creative period, the first result of which was his Jeux vénitiens (1960–61).

2. 2. A composer is surrounded by sounds. Do they influence you and are they in any way of significance for your compositional work?

3. 3. How far can one speak of a personal style and where does self-repetition begin?

Eighty-two composers have undertaken to reply to the same three questions. Masters and pupils, pioneers and followers, allies and adversaries. Comrades. Each and every one of them heir to the same tradition, except for the youngest, themselves predecessors who have enriched tradition for the new generations to draw upon.

In becoming composers, they have woven further the infinitely varied carpet of music history, in keeping with inherited rules, but changing, modifying, refining the method of selecting and knotting together the yarns. The carpet is there, spread out for all of them to see; each is free to learn from the others, whether the classics or contemporaries.

That is what the first question is about: having taken a seat at the loom, what has served as inspiration—the carpet woven in the past or those currently engaged in weaving it? And having arrived at a personal method, have they been able or willing to modify it, following the realization, sometimes through a revelation, that there are other ways as well?

It was Witold Lutosławski who called my attention to the possibility of a revelation. He had only heard on the radio a few minutes of a composition he had not known before (the second piano concerto by John Cage) and, all of a sudden, it opened up new vistas—for him hitherto uncharted territories. That experience changed once and for all the Polish composer’s musical thinking.

It was that astounding confession that in subsequent years induced me to try to find out whether other composers had had similar experiences when listening to a piece of music.

I wanted a reply to the thrilling question as to what complex interplay of influences had shaped the music history of the past decades.