Talking music

William Duckworth, a cutting-edge composer and musicologist himself, spent more than a decade visiting the leading lights of new American music, beginning with the music's spiritual godfather, John Cage, and progressing through the latest innovators. His goal was to let the composers talk about their work in their own words; to show how their personal lives and struggles to create their art colored their output; to discuss seriously their aesthetic goals; and to analyze their influences. The discussions that result are free-ranging but always focused, revealing the many radically new…