This is one of the most common questions one hears when engaging in this strange activity. I often reply, “It’s not at all the mystery people think it is. When you’ve been doing it your whole life, it simply becomes the most natural thing in the world. Just as a writer thinks in words, we think in music.” But is it really “thinking”? And how does it actually happen that a beginning suddenly appears, the music develops from it, and finally finds its way to an ending? Does the composer consciously decide where the music is supposed to go? Or does the music have a will of its own, as the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara once said in an interview? Are we merely midwives, then? This sense of “wondering” about one’s own actions is something probably every composer experiences in one way or another.

The inner drive to compose music can stem from entirely different sources. The approach is also highly personal. Some seek inspiration in nature or in their lived experience, others in mathematical laws. How much composers rely on inspiration and consciously choose their method, and how much they simply “cannot do otherwise,” often remains uncertain even to themselves.

I feel that my own drive arises, broadly speaking, from a search or longing for “beauty” in music. Yet the moment one uses the term “beauty,” one steps onto very slippery ground. What should “beauty” in music be? What one can understand by it is extremely vague, flexible, and subjective. By it I do not mean an aesthetic ideal or something uniformly “positive,” but rather an inner—or one could say, a soulful—resonance experienced through music. The terms “beauty” and “harmony” seem closely connected. Beauty and harmony in music seem to be a certain balance of what we perceive as opposites. If this balance is present in a work or perhaps arises only within our inner experience, then paradoxically even ugliness can be “beautiful,” and harmony can be felt as such precisely because disharmony and dissonance are present. Music lives from opposites and contrasts. Without them, it becomes “mono-tonous.” Contrasts such as dissonance–consonance, fast–slow, loud–soft, pulsing–floating, tension–release breathe life into music. How deeply these contrasts are felt is, again, highly subjective.

I believe that beauty and harmony, in their perfection or absoluteness, can never be achieved through human creativity, and therefore the search and longing will remain forever. But if we look beyond human creativity and turn to nature, many would agree that something like perfect beauty does exist—regardless of what we look at: a colorful butterfly, an earthworm, or even a withered plant. Beauty is already “there” in everything and waiting to be discovered; it is only a question of whether and how we perceive it. Beauty in nature can be felt as perfect because we are convinced that we, as humans, cannot improve it through any intervention. This is also how I see beauty in music: beauty that moves, touches, or shakes us is tied to the certainty that everything “must be this way” and is in the right place, that even the smallest change could not improve it.

The intuitive creative act is preceded by a musical “vision.” Such a vision can give the emerging music a certain flow to which the interpreter can later surrender, and which is perceived—consciously or unconsciously—by the listener as a kind of logical coherence of musical events. Through this flow, the music can gain a sense of rightness that becomes, for the performer or listener, a measure of “understanding,” entirely independent of style, zeitgeist, epoch, or culture. Even though it is tricky to speak of understanding in connection with something as subjectively perceived as music.

On the other hand, the intellect is a marvelous tool for grasping, analyzing, dissecting, and combining. Yet it can neither create nor perceive “wholes.” For example, it is ultimately impossible for us to truly comprehend or imagine non-dimensionality or infinity intellectually, even though we can work with these concepts mathematically.

A purely intellectual process of composition is driven solely by an effort of will: using the knowledge at hand and the resulting palette of ideas to create a meaningful “whole.” The result can be virtuosic and interesting. And yet, despite the concept being thought through to the last detail and holding together, the sounding result often carries with it a certain arbitrariness that continually raises the question: why this way, and why not another? (The “logic” of the musical unfolding is then often borrowed from extramusical elements such as texts or concepts.)

Those who seek the poetic, the magical, the transcendent in music will find little help in concepts and logical thinking. While the intuitive creative act can lead to music that reaches beyond the personal, a purely cerebral creation will revolve within the circle of possibilities stored in memory.

The search for “beauty” in the sense of inner resonance, as I understand it, is not an active effort or striving toward something. Rather, one places oneself in a certain state of mind in which one first waits to see what will happen. It is, quite unspectacularly, a kind of daydreaming—a resting state of constant thinking—and this calm need not necessarily involve the outer world. Intuitive composers have their rituals for entering this state. I like to seek solitude and detachment from all obligations in order to immerse myself in my work fully and without distraction. In recent years, the alpine landscapes of Switzerland and Vorarlberg have been places of refuge for me.