Talk with a composer these days, and you likely won’t have to dig very deep to find some serious bitterness over the direction of the classical music industry. Orchestras are deathly afraid of driving away audiences with difficult contemporary works, record labels are only interested in pop-crossover junk, and the spectre of serialism still makes most listeners wary of anything new. Still, with obscurity comes freedom, and “a lot of the dross around composing and what it means has been cut away and people are certainly expressing their hearts more.”