Twenty-seven years after our interview in the composer’s home, very little lingers on in the way of personal recollections. I was picked up at the railroad station by Mme Amy in her rather ramshackle Renault 5 and driven to their house. There, I was received by the composer with genuine hospitality. He had none of the air of the “master”; rather, I was struck by his modesty and disarming simplicity.

The interview itself proved ideal for the purposes of this book in that the composer could cite several examples of the way some of the milestones of new music history exerted a direct influence on his own efforts.

Early on in his career, Amy was regarded as a talented pupil of Boulez’s, implying perhaps a failure to develop a personality of his own. In later years, however, the individual traits of his music made those of his teacher recede into the background. As Paul Griffiths puts it: Amy “has travelled a great distance from the Boulezism of his 20s to the spacious works of his 50s and 60s, maturity with him bringing a wider awareness and also a greater sense of perplexity.”

I.

I believe every composer shares the experience reported by Lutosławski at one point in his career. I am surprised how late in his life he encountered it.

I was twenty years old when I first heard music by composers of the Second Viennese School; also some more recent pieces. The lessons I drew from them determined the way I wrote music. Later too, I heard works which may not have made me want to imitate them, but they encouraged me to take over some of their technical means. Such was Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras or some of Boulez’s compositions.

A composition may exert a lasting influence if it is rooted in tradition but also brings something new and creates a synthesis of the two. For instance, in Gruppen, Stockhausen does not change the instrumentation of the orchestra, he works with the forces we all know from the concert hall. On the other hand, he devised a new spatial arrangement and a notation which have nothing to do with the traditional symphony orchestra. The instruments sound in the usual manner but we hear them differently because of the novel arrangement.