Bang on a Can

Back in 1985-1986, there was a boom in home recording equipment. I started working a lot with computers, combining electronic, pop and world music with classical music. I plunder cultures a lot. It's the ultimate kind of cacaphony. But unlike a postmodern aesthetic where everything is equal, what I do is more hierarchical, more structural--I introduce chaos, but from it one element emerges and triumphs over the others. In Tristan, Doris, and Geraldo, I took mutually exclusive sounds and tried to make something universal out of them. I started with Wagner, the thirds he uses in Tristan und Isolde, as a symbol of the Old World. Then there was some Doris Day that I liked, and she became representative of modern culture. And I took quotes from Geraldo, which is like the trashier end of civilization where we exist now. I was trying to find some meaning out of these disparate elements. It's like having a channel switcher, but staying longer on a certain channel and creating an architecture. To be a composer, you have to have a deep inner view of the world. For me, good music is good architecture is good ethics. -Michael Maguire