Paul Steenhuisen: You have gone to great effort to find new types of sounds in your music. What was your intention?

Helmut Lachenmann: It is true that I am trying to search for new sounds, but this is not my aesthetic aim or credo as an artist. With conventional or unconventional sounds, the question is how to create a new, authentic musical situation. The problem is not to search for new sounds, but for a new way of listening, of perception. I do not know if there are still new sounds, but what we need is new contexts.

- From "Interview with Helmut Lachenmann - Toronto, 2003" in Contemporary Music Review

I have become increasingly preoccupied with atmosphere, in particular the kind of atmosphere that one finds surrounding a Mark Rothko painting. When I am in the presence of a Rothko work (also after I have departed and later, upon further reflection), I'm struck not by "whew! what great brush strokes! what an incredible technique! what a painter!", but instead by a feeling of the surrounding atmosphere and its sensation.

Somehow I wanted to move what I'm doing (intention) towards this notion of atmosphere, an activity where we're not aware of technique, of instrument, of playing, of music even, but instead as feeling/sensation suspended in space, perhaps what Feldman meant by music as time, energising the air, making the silence (unintention) audible.

- Keith Rowe, Duos for Doris notes

Michael Pisaro, Eleven Theses on the State of New Music (2004/2006) (PDF)

One of my complaints about the younger generation ... is that for me at least sound was the hero, and it still is. I feel that I'm subservient. I feel that I listen to my sounds, and I do what they tell me, not what I tell them. Because I owe my life to these sounds. Right? They gave me a life. And my feeling is in a sense is the young people ... instead of thinking of sound as a hero, of experience as the hero, you get to think that they're the heroes. And I find a little bit too much drawing attention to themselves ... in their work, drawing attention to their ideas, whether they're anti-society, or whether it's political.

[...]

To take a militant attitude towards society means that you're involved with that aspect of society. You're not involved with life. To take a militant action in relation to life, that's more mysterious. That needs thought. To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe ... not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it ... except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life ... if you're into it.

- Morton Feldman, Conversation between Morton Feldman and Walter Zimmermann