Daryl: In past centuries there was a unity or coherence between alchemy, the science of numbers, and various religious, literary and philosophical understandings of the world, which often influenced and permeated works of art, and indeed music composition. Most recently the kind of clear delineations that various studies have had, clearly expressed in the institutions of tertiary learning (wherein physics and art are quite separate disciplines), appear to have effectively distilled out an involvement of the «arts» world and its practitioners from the kinds of concerns and interests that scientists have had in pursuit of their comprehension of the universe. Is DARK MATTER for you a conscious reversal of this trend? What has led you away from previous extra-musical interests focussed on literature, for example Beckett?

Richard: I don't know about trends. This «coherence» you mentioned has to do with the fact that in past ages both artists and (for example) alchemists were operating at the leading edge of what was then understood about the world. Given the knowledge and tools at their disposal, it was entirely reasonable for them to conceive of reality in the way they did. After the «scientific revolution» which began around 1600, it took artists some time to catch up with the entirely different way scientists had begun to think. This begins to change in the early part of the last century, when artists such as Schoenberg, Varèse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Joyce and so on began to engage with the fundamentals of their art in a way that wouldn't have been conceived of previously. Many people have still not «caught up», of course. More recently, Xenakis makes the point that self-similar or «fractal» structures existed in music, albeit in an uncodified form, before mathematicians described and gave a name to them. It's interesting to me to imagine that a speculative music might even now be embodying discoveries which scientists haven't arrived at yet.

This returns us to one of the «irreducible mysteries» I mentioned before which is central to DARK MATTER. When a theoretical physicist finds an elegant and powerful mathematical formalism which unifies large swathes of previously «unrelated» data and anomalies (Einstein's general relativity is the classic example), is he or she really discovering something which is «out there» (and in the case of a mathematical equation, out where???), or superimposing some manifestation of inbuilt human pattern-recognition (evolved through millions of years of natural selection) upon a reality which might in fact have no such «laws» of its own? What about when a composer or other artist has a new «idea»? How closely are these things related? Is it possible that some avenues of discovery (or whatever it is) are more appropriately traversed by artists rather than scientists? What are the implications of this?

As for the «fascination with science», of course I had this before any thought of creating music had entered my head. Also, there's been no move away from anything, but rather an expansion to include more things. This should be clear from the presence of a Beckett text in DARK MATTER. People often see an artist's development as proceeding linearly, changing directions as a result of logic and/or contingency; I would see my own as more «concentric», gradually encompassing more and more of a certain terrain and trying to unify the results somehow. Maybe this isn't development at all! What is now DARK MATTER really began twenty years ago as an idea for some kind of cosmological «oratorio», of which the voice/piano piece Principia, which I wrote between 1982 and '84, was a kind of spinoff. Such a project was far beyond me at that time. So in some ways I'm not moving on to something new here, but reincorporating some ideas which have been fermenting slowly in the background for some time.

Lastly, I always have the same difficulty with the term «extra-musical» as I do with saying what this music is «about». When I'm working I don't really make a distinction between what's «musical» and what isn't. Perhaps I ought to, some might say  . . .  but that again is an important aspect of DARK MATTER. It's a confluence of so many things, not just the scientific or philosophical ideas we've talked about, including even «intra-musical» connections -- while some of its sound-structures might result from a contemplation, say, of Einstein's curved spacetime, others (or other aspects of the very same ones) might result from a contemplation of Ockeghem's canonic compositional techniques. But the result is as different from one as it is from the other, nor is it a patchwork of references but something which has its own coherences, and its own incoherences.