Louis Andriessen: New Music school?

The Dutch composer Louis Andriessen is usually rated among the New Music school, but he always was interested in other genres as well, as Christian Broecking reports ( die tageszeitung ): "He believes that Cecil Taylor's piano music is more complex than that of Xenakis and that you change the way you think when you heard Eric Dolphy." Everything has become more difficult today, thinks the composer, who in 1969 together with Misha Mengelberg wrote the opera "Rekonstruktion". Yet there are more ensembles today that are able to deal "with complex structures, jazz and improvisation". Broecking reports about Andriessen's newest composition "Letter from Cathy", an hommage to the singer Cathy Berberian; and he quotes Andriessen who thinks that Boulez and Stockhausen are limited because "in modernism there exists a taboo of other music". Most of the so called enhanced techniques in contemporary music come from free jazz or from improvised music, he argues. If you don't know about it you just play the notes. "And there is no soul in that."