Hunting and forms: an interview with Wolfgang Rihm

This interview with Wolfgang Rihm took place on 18 November 2000, during the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, at which Rihm was one of the featured composers. The interview was conducted in English, which is not a language which Rihm favours for extended discussion of his compositional processes. Indeed, during an open forum in the 1990s which included Boulez and Berio, and which was documented by Hermann Danuser, Rihm says at one point, after a particularly long exchange with the other participants in English, and when the question is finally addressed directly at him, 'Not in English, please'. As his first statement in the present interview makes clear, he cannot make words describe the 'intimate processes' of composition in English as he can in German. In the conversation which follows I have undertaken a small amount of necessary editing in order to clarify some of the composer's intended meanings. Nevertheless Rihm's understanding of his art is always interesting and frequently laced with humour, even when expressed in a language with which he is not most comfortable.