Was it Cage or Tenney who said that if personality is there, it will come out anyway?
Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. The “Barlow feel” wasn’t my intention, but I didn’t try to run away from it either. I didn’t say, oh, I’ve got a style, or, how nice, or how horrible! It’s just one of those things: you look in the mirror and you happen to have a nose in the middle of your face and that’s the way it is. How were your earliest pieces of yours received in the Cologne days? They must have sounded very strange. Well, they did sound strange to a lot of people, but other people were doing strange things too at that time, like Walter Zimmermann, Kevin Volans, Gerald Barry and John McGuire, and we were all one group. People looked at us as a group. We didn’t have a name, fortunately, but I remember somebody writing in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik saying that there was a kind of school centred around Clarence Barlow and I thought, oh God, forming a school is the last thing that I would want. But it so happened that we were a family, we met very often and liked each other’
