Heard this fabulous interview that Ira Glass did with his second cousin Philip Glass, my favorite modern composer, on NPR’s Fresh Air, & I found this section particularly compelling:

PHILIP GLASS: I realized that [my teacher Nadia Boulanger] was teaching the relationship between technique and style.

For example, now let’s put the question another way. If you listen to let’s say a measure of Rachmaninoff and then a measure of Bach, you know which is which without, you know immediately. And the question is well, why do you know that? They both are following basically the same rules of harmonic, of voice leading. But what happens is that you have in your, the course of your listening, you have taught yourself—you’ve recognized that Rachmaninoff will always solve a certain problem in a certain way. You may not say that to yourself, but your ear will tell you that. And that Bach will do it in his way. And you say, oh, that sounds like Bach or that sounds like Rachmaninoff or that sounds like Stravinsky. And what you’re hearing is let’s put it this way: You’re hearing the predilection of the composer to resolve a technical problem in a highly personal way. …

The point is—and this is the other thing which she didn’t say in words that day, but which I understood totally, was that in order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique.

You have to have a place to make the choices from. …

If you don’t have a basis on which to make to make the choice, then you don’t have a style at all, you have a series of accidents.

IRA GLASS: Looking at your career from the outside, one of the things that’s striking is the number of different collaborators that you’ve worked with and I wonder if part of it is because you had the seminal experience of confronting somebody else’s work.

PHILIP GLASS: Well, that’s exactly—that’s exactly what happens when you find your place, yourself in a place of total ignorance of that kind. And that’s the place where you can begin again, you can begin learning again. You know, the difficulty with any—well, it’s not just artists or musicians but with anybody in any ordinary part of life—walk of life—the difficulty we have is how we continue to learn.

I mean, this is—everybody has this problem. Because you get what we call our training and education to a certain point and we spend the rest of our life changing gears in the same way. And the biggest—this is particularly true of composers, they pick up a style or way of working a certain way, but the real issue, I’ve always said to younger composers, it’s not how do you find your voice but how to get rid of it.

Getting the voice isn’t hard, it’s getting rid of the damn thing. Because once you’ve got the voice then you’re kind of stuck with it.

IRA GLASS: You’ve said to Terry Gross—in fact, she’s asked you—do you ever try to compose so it doesn’t sound like Philip Glass?

PHILIP GLASS: I do it all the time and I fail all the time. (LAUGHTER) I learned that the only hope of shaking free of your own description of music was to place yourself in such an untenable position that you had to figure out something new. That happened with Ravi Shankar in 1964 and I repeated that experience. I do it whenever I can. And that means constantly finding new people to work with.

The thing is, is that as much as much as I try to do it, how rarely have I actually succeeded. It’s very humbling, actually, when you realize how hard it is to break out of your own training. It’s very, very difficult.