Harrison Birtwistle is turning 70. George Loomis asks him if it isn’t a good thing that “composers are now free to do their own thing without the pressure of writing in a certain style? ‘Actually, it shows we’re in a state of crisis,’ he says, arguing that if you look historically at the subject of creativity, something always appears for people to rally around, as they did with cubism and serialism. ‘Right now we need something to come how do they say it in baseball? out of left field’.”