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that then; I do now. I wondered—I started writing the piece [The History of Photography in Sound] 2004–5 maybe2, so it’s not an early piece—so I was wondering, have I been a photographer all these years? Am I just continuing his work? Because I do sometimes casually refer to what I do as a kind of documentation, and I do put myself into my work to an extent that some composers don’t. And I acknowledge my sources to an extent that most composers don’t. (I actually do that in the score, I list the pieces: as we go along there are little arrows saying this is a quote from ‘blah’.) I’m not a photographer [but] I read a lot about photography. We were talking earlier about Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida, there’s Susan’s Sontag’s book on photography, and there are quite a few other tomes, about the meaning of photographs, the background, the ‘reading’ of a photo. Which I find very fascinating if slightly offensive because photos are a visual medium, and visualising something is not an narrative, it’s not a literary process. The way in which a photograph evolves—and sometimes the information [the photograph] is designed to impart—are not the same as a writing a story, or describing a thing. You’re sometimes revealing a thing in the same way Paul Klee writes about revealing an object by painting it, or by drawing it. You’re actually extracting something which is not . . . I’m not literary either, so it’s not something I find in literature. But one has to be careful in music, because what are you doing? Are you simply supplementing, are you adding sounds to the world that haven’t been there before? (There’s the question of taking responsibility for doing that, needless to say.) What are you seeking to do? Are you bringing sounds out of nothing? Are we simply making a kind of refuse dump of sound, or creating some pompous edifice? People refer to works as ‘monumental’: I really hate that word. It’s like those dreadful buildings in Paris, where everything is pseudo-Romanesque memorial to something. I don’t design monuments. I have adventures, I go on journeys. If I have to talk about pieces, the process is one of discovery. I set myself a task thinking ‘well I might have a good time if I do this.’ If I find I’m not by day 3 then I scrap it all and start something else, because I’d be a fool not to. It’s both uncovering and disclosing and investigating; it’s performing 1 [Ed. The actual dates of composition of The History of Photography of Sound are 1995-2001—MF may just have got the wrong decade.]