My composition teacher at college was at Darmstadt the same time that Boulez & co were, and the influence on him was so profound that he destroyed all the music he had written up to then, and was - as he put it - born anew from that time onwards. I find that I prefer more conventional music, but I certainly learned a lot in that class. He used to set us atonal-composition exercises that were as tightly constrained by rules as the strictest classical harmony & counterpoint, saying that we would find freedom within discipline. I didn't produce any masterpieces, but it did stretch my mind around a whole new way of writing and listening, and bring to consciousness a previously-subterranean world.

A related memory stands out in my mind: I often visited a friend who shared a large flat with several others, and one of their frequent callers was the then-percussionist of the Boston Symphony. One day he walked in with a big carry-all shopping bag, filled with what looked like little bits of builders' rubble. Without a word he then proceeded to empty its contents onto the dining room table. It still looked like builders' rubble (and was, stuff he'd found lying around on some vacant lot somewhere). One of us asked him what all that junk was, and he replied simply, "It's music." Then he picked up the various objects and - there's no other word for it - played them. It was spellbinding, and we were all mesmerised. The man (now dead) was a true artist and he managed to unlock the music in these bits of metal, concrete and glass that others had thrown out. Small wonder that he held one of the top percussion jobs in the country. I am reminded of this by Gargoyle's statement above - "clocks, bottles, water, gas, fire, papers, pipes". He would have agreed totally (and then proceeded to demonstrate the principle, brilliantly, with whatever lay to hand).

I saw this thread when it was first put up, and at that time the link had no clickie (or maybe it was just my computer being recalcitrant). So I copied-&-pasted, and then the fun began. For some reason it totally flummoxed my browser, which kept flashing onto different pages I had just been to (no unknown websites so it wasn't a hi-jack) and it seemed to particularly like my Mudcat past visits. For ages I could NOT get it to behave itself (reminded me of the photocopy machine taking on a life of its own in the movie Nine To Five). And the merrier the dance I was led, the more determined I became to FIND the damn thing. Eventually the fiery fox managed to hunt it down. I can't help but think that KS would have been amused.

R.I.P.