In Cul­ture no.1, I wanted to focus on sev­eral issues that I saw as par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to our rapidly chang­ing cul­ture milieu. These include an imme­di­ate and simple pre­sen­ta­tion of mate­r­ial, clar­ity of pur­pose, the high­est pos­si­ble degree of sim­plic­ity in the orga­ni­za­tion of mate­r­ial, and musi­cal ideas that can live “in the moment”, with­out the need to ref­er­ence large sec­tions of the piece on mul­ti­ple levels. These are themes that have remained impor­tant to me since and have also fig­ured promi­nently in the sub­se­quent two pieces in the Cul­ture series.

When I first wrote Cul­ture no.1, I thought of it in terms of a dichotomy between pop­u­lar music and the West­ern clas­si­cal tra­di­tion. How­ever, in the sub­se­quent years I’ve tem­pered my inter­pre­ta­tion. I no longer see a con­flict between tra­di­tions, only a reflec­tion on the rit­u­als of music-making. It is also, to a point, a test­ing of cul­tural con­ven­tions par­tic­u­lar to the concert-music ritual. This focus on ritual and cul­tural con­ven­tion is what I think makes the piece suc­cess­ful in the end. I’ve gotten a lot of strong reac­tions to Cul­ture no.1, from “incomprehensible” to “masterpiece”. For me, that kind of polar­iza­tion always speaks to the cul­tural res­o­nance of a work of art, and cul­tural res­o­nance is cer­tainly appro­pri­ate to the theme I wanted to explore.