I constantly read or hunt for poems, either to set them vocally, or to use them as inspiration for non-vocal music. An endless source of inspiration for me has been the amazing world of Henri Michaux, whose poetry essentially is an exploration and analysis of the ‘space within’, the infinite universe of the inner self.

In my 2004 solo piano work, Inner Banners, each of the five movements evokes an element – respectively: earth, fire, water, air, metal – which I imagined as constitutive of an imaginary world of the inner self. The first four movements are directly based on (Plains, Chains, The self-erasing bird) or inspired (Pools) by poems of Henri Michaux. Plains and Chains were even initially conceived as melodies. Chains’ rhythmic structure reflects the shrinking verse structure of the poem (6-5-4-3-2, etc.). The alternation of suspended echoes or sudden silences in The self-erasing bird mimic the appearance and disappearance of the bird, while the longing melody in the middle section is a direct setting of one line of the poem.

Voyage (1987) sets three poems of Michaux, and is another exploration of the inner self, resulting in a typically strange sense of elsewhereness. The structure of these early poems is remarkably traditional for Michaux, lending the music a strong dramatic arch.

Zygiella’s Visions is inspired by one of Michaux’s poems about the drug experiments made on the Zygiella x-notata spider and their influence on its web weaving. In typical single mindedness fashion, the marimba represents the spider, the strings its web, the brutal bass clarinet interventions evoking the administration of the various drugs.

In 2011, during a post-mortem of the premiere of my Writing the City with my old friend Hélène, I was complaining that I couldn’t ever find poems that I felt worked for me, inspired me, allowed me to really let go, musically. So, she got up (that was when she was still able to get up), and put in my hands a little booklet: Jacques Roubaud’s Animaux de Personne. Right there and then I read four or five poems, and told her: “Well, I should have asked you before.” The humor and strength of these poems totally seized me. I chose to set La Gerboise (The Jerboa), whose jumping around from the Sahara to North of Paris really talked to me. In Le Lièvre Variable, faithful to the spirit of the poem, I chose to change modality (or tonality) and meter in almost every bar. The ritornello in Le Couscous Tacheté, which is in italics in the poem, I chose to have whispered throughout (provoking many vocal problems in dedicated tenor sections throughout the world). Somehow, Le Mouton à Grosses Fesses had to be a tango, which seemed to me to correspond to the grotesque and exaggerated posture of this poor vegetarian. Jacques Roubaud is a long-standing member of the Oulipo. He is actually responsible for the co-optation of George Perec to the group.

For Three English Songs (2022), I chose three poets whose universes I adore, particularly that of Pessoa. I intend to set more poems by him in the future. As with Michaux, his universe is highly personal, and he’s particularly apt at describing the feeling of being inside and outside the world, as well as not being quite sure who ‘I’ is…. Something that mirrors my own feelings of not quite belonging to this world. Two powerful poems by W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore complete the set.

Being a composer particularly influenced by ideas, concepts and words rather than visuals, the poetry of Louise Labé, Maurice Scève, Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jacottet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edith Södergran, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, Goran Simi, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Wisława Szymborska, among others, is never far from my imagination. Francis Ponge doubtless occupies a special place in my heart, and could be considered a spiritual grand-father to my Soap Opera.

An unusual occurrence in my production is the use of the last page of La Femme adultère – the first short story in a collection by Albert Camus entitled Exile and the Kingdom – as inspiration for a piece for string quartet and percussion. This page recounts the mythical and quasi sexual experience of an unhappily married woman with the desert and the sky at night. There is something quite magical in Camus’ description of the stars turning in the cold sky, and the woman’s response that really moved me. In this composition, I attempted to reproduce the experience, but with music instead of words.

In Writing the City, for orchestra and two narrators, I collected excerpts of many writers associated with New York City, where I lived for several years. First among them, Paul Auster who, for a while, lived very near where I myself resided, at the very bottom of Greenwich Village, and whose universe particularly speaks to me. Walt Whitman, Henry Miller were of course obligatory companions, as well as Vivian Gornick. Thomas Wolfe is a writer I discovered while writing this piece, and the moving excerpt from his 1935 Of Time and the River provides the basis for the affecting ending of the piece.

Many other writers are dear to my soul and their universes feed my creativity like so many subterranean rivers. Among them, two writers from Oulipo: Italo Calvino (whose first chapter of his Mr. Palomar inspired my 1987 Demosthenes and the Telescope as well as my 2021 Leurs Sauvages Échos) and Raymond Queneau, whose poetry I don’t despair to set to music some day. Fantastic Realism is also remarkably ubiquitous in my mental catalog, with such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges (whose House of Asterion inspired my Dances for Asterion), Alejo Carpentier (who eagerly integrated music into his writings), Mikhail Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Dino Buzzati, Marcel Aymé, Boris Vian, Jean Giono, Richard Brautigan, Haruki Murakami (another writer for whom music is a fundamental inspiration), Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Michel Tournier (I have a project to write a symphonic poem on his Limbes du Pacifique), etc.

My brain works strangely vis-à-vis language, as it automatically rearranges any word or sentence into anagrams or spoonerisms, systematically looks for palindromic or ambigrammatic possibilities, constantly plays games with words and letters. My musical brain follows the same impulse: whenever I write a melody, I systematically write down its inversion, its retrograde, and its retrograde inversion.

Prime examples of such procedures are found in Dances for Asterion,a 5-movement work for string orchestra. In the central piece (Dance iii),several constraints are at work simultaneously. The fragmented dancing theme alternates two bars of 5/8 followed by empty bars of alternating 3/4 & 5/4. The second statement of the theme is a two-voice canon by inversion. In the third and fourth repetition of the theme (still two-voice canons by inversion, this time off an eighth note, and with increasing octave displacements), the initial empty bars are filled with jerky (quarter triplets) insertions, using a procedure found the secret Javanese argot born in XIXth century France, a little bit like pig-latin. The second section introduces a new theme, treated as a three-voice direct canon over the dance theme (still in canon by inversion). After a few more sections of the theme being harmonized, then shrunk down in ambitus; section 2 is repeated in retrograde for the dance theme (this time as a two-voice harmonized inverted canon), while the second theme (still a three-voice canon) has the three voices start at the same time, resulting in unexpected harmonies. The piece concludes with the first three sections repeated in retrograde.

Dance for Astérion ii starts with a three-voice canon at the unison, followed by a three-voice canon harmonized. The middle section introduces a new theme, also treated as a three-voice canon at the unison and the third. The piece concludes with a modified retrograde version of the two first sections. All the movements in Dances for Asterion are heavily indebted to the procedures found in the later string quartets of Bartók. The whole piece is inspired by Borges’ short story The House of Asterion.

Peal, for Pierrot quintet, is built on a long theme which is repeated throughout the piece and always treated as a two-voice canon by inversion. The melody is built with small units, allowing the dux and comes to switch, and the imitation time interval to vary, in order to provide rhythmic interest. The point of symmetry is different in each section. The piece concludes with the same two-voice canon, this time mensurated (the voices at two different speeds).

In stretch, I made use of even more canonical procedures. The 16-minute orchestra piece consists entirely of multiple canons, the main one (at unison between the violins) being mensurated (the second violins are three times slower). Some canons are built bit by bit, with the introduction of one note at a time. This process is then reversed in the second half of the piece, which behaves as a palindrome with notes disappearing one at a time. Furthermore, some of the canons are inverted and elongated in the second half of the piece.

Obviously, I am a big fan of canons, which is where my publishing company gets its catchy name. I use canons constantly, and systematically apply procedures of retrograde and inversion to most melodies that occur to me, even merely as an exploration. This is part laziness because this just provides cheap material, and satisfies my need for nerdiness and self-justification. Most of my compositions contain at least one canon, often by inversion.

Mynah Games is a seven-movement work with a quasi-palindromic shape. The two ‘blues’ framing the piece are mirror images of each other, with the last movement a retrograde (but shortened) version of the first. Mvt. 6 is a strict palindrome with the first half repeating itself in retrograde verbatim. Movements 3 and 5 mirror each other in that 5 is a retrograde version of 3. Mvt. 4 is a palindrome.

I play similar games with words, as I myself dabble with the oulipian constraint making up a puzzle, whose solution is a homophony. So far, I have written more than 300 of them, all on the theme of opera: titles of opera, both in their original language or their French translation, composers, librettists, etc. Furthermore, in the case of a solution in Italian, English, German, Russian, or Spanish, I do not shy away from employing the à-peu-près technique used by Luis d’Antin van Rooten in his 1967 Mots d’heures: Gousses, Rames (Mother Goose Rhymes).

You can find some examples below:

Quel est ce son ? Vieuille.
Une mélodie ? Gerville-Réache.
Fragment de chanson : Dufranne.
Quelques hauteurs : Périer.
Des notes ? Garden. (The Knot Garden)

Zouave ? Gratin dauphinois !
Mariolle ? Chips !
Pistolet ? Aligot !
Olibrius ? Purée
Zig? Frites! (Siegfried)

Tuile à cogne, tu comprends, ho ? Grimpe ! Ton nom ?
Pépin à matuche, tu t’remets, là ? Escalade ! Vos papiers !
Bec de perdreau, tu piges, alors ? Va en haut ! C’est quoi ton blaze ?
Os de condé, t’entraves, à la fin ? À l’étage ! Identité ?
Hic à poulet, t’y es, dis ? Monte ! T’es qui ? (I Capuleti e i Montecchi)

Quatre colliers massifs autour de Seyssel
Plusieurs carcans solides auprès de Saint-Péray
Dix-sept fardeaux trapus du côté de Cerdon
Cinq bâts lourds aux environs de Limoux
Deux jougs épais vers Die (Giuseppe Verdi)

Music is of course my main source of inspiration. My parents were not musicians and we never listened to music together. I was somehow put at the piano at age 5 and that was that. At home in my youth, we had a few LPs that totally fashioned my musical imagination. It was a very strange collection, starting with Sibelius’ 4th symphony and Tapiola, which fascinated me and is probably responsible for so strangely shaping my ear and sense of form. There was also a recording of Debussy’s Images pour piano, which intrigued me but did not seduce me. Piccolo, Saxo et Compagnie was listened to often, as was Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Errol Garner’s Move!, which I absolutely adored and listened to constantly, completed this motley crew. I think I started listening to all that only around 9 or 10.

As my interest in music appeared to develop, my parents started buying more records, particularly vulgarization LPs with inserts recounting the life of various baroque, classical, and romantic composers, and I got familiar with the usual suspects: Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Chopin and the like. When I was 11, my first piano teacher suddenly died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and I was sent to another teacher who introduced me to Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy et al., after years of enduring composers with barbaric names and compositions that left me frustrated. At that time, I also started playing the organ and improvising, which in turn led to notating some of these improvisations.

When I turned 12, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring burst onto my inner scene, revolutionizing my musical consciousness, along with Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Concomitantly, I started exploring the works of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in particular, but also Berg’s Violin concerto and Webern’s Symphony. Those two radically different aesthetics started a strange but easy and rich cohabitation. It was then that I began composing short piano pieces inspired by poems by Baudelaire, and smelling a lot like a mixture of these, with more than a significant sprinkle of Ravel and the occasional Prokofiev tossed into the mix. Some of these pieces were thrown at my unsuspecting classmates as exercises in sight-reading.

Up to that point in my life, there had been very little interest outside of classical music and jazz, except for a lot of Pink Floyd (which was the default soundtrack for our free dance class at school), and, at home, with some odd choices by my mom such as The Kinks’ This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us (!) or Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime. I wasn’t even aware of the Beatles until 17, believe it or not. However, little by little, under the influence of some friends, I gratefully discovered Zappa, and later on Weather Report and Gentle Giant, those three remaining in my daily listening to this day.

It was also around that time that I began exploring contemporary music per se, however finding little that really spoke to me, with a few notable exceptions. I adored Berio’s Sinfonia, particularly the third movement, which enchanted me, and keeps doing so. Another one was Davies’ 8 Songs for a Mad King, which delighted me. The mixing of theatre, extended techniques and humor was to have a highly significant impact on my psyche as a composer. Inspired by both these works, and keen on escaping the concert format, my first ‘real’ composition was Tutti! (1977), which consisted of little original music, an enormous quantity of musical and literary quotes, and theatrics. I must have been in quite a revolutionary frame of mind at that point, since the end of the piece had the musicians setting up a barricade with their instruments, before setting fire to it. I was 16. This piece, strangely, was never performed.

As an organist, I played quite a lot of music by Messiaen (a must for organists), and the influence of his harmonic language on mine is quite obvious, although formally he and I are worlds apart.

After a first music teaching job in my 17th year, and despite being still full of music, I temporarily gave it up, and moved to Paris to study architecture before returning to music for good, through singing, two short years later. It was then that I discovered minimalist music, specifically Steve Reich’s. I find his Octet, Music for 18 Musicians, Music for a Large Ensemble and Tehillim (heard later while in the US) absolutely brilliant: those pieces set out to do a job, and they do it marvelously. Although I rarely gave in to writing a minimalist piece throughout (save maybe for The weight of Water or stretch), the music of Steve Reich remains enormously influential on my musical thinking, the idea of process in music in particular.

After one year of study in vocal performance, I was hired by several professional vocal ensembles, and discovered the universe of Medieval and Renaissance music, singing Josquin des Prez, Dufay Ockeghem, Agricola, de Lassus, Solage, Palestrina, Byrd, Tallis, and the like. I loved singing that repertoire, enjoying the polyphony tremendously, as well as the hoquets and strange intervals of Machaut

I moved to the US to study voice further, hoping for a career as an operatic singer. I stopped my compositional activity altogether although I kept improvising at the piano a great deal. I took piano jazz lessons on top of dance, choreography, yoga, theater, stage combat, German, and Russian. I composed only one work during my last year of college, an accompaniment to a short ballet. I performed almost more as a dancer than as a singer at that time.

During my first year of grad school, I took a class in electronic music with Jack Vees, and I was soon back to composing like a madman, churning out minimalistic works, jazz-influenced works, long works for dance and the stage, while fighting with leads in Puccini’s La Bohème, or Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In my second year of grad school, I switched majors and went back to composition for good (at least at the time), entering the program with King Vern, a jazzy piece filled with canons and dangerous alternating meters, a strange mixture of Gentle Giant, Weather Report, and Ligeti.

I greatly admire the strange and powerful universe of Ligeti, my master’s master, from the string quartets and Musica Ricercata, though Atmospheres, Lontano, all the way to the Etudes, The Nonsense Madrigals and the last concerti. Around this time, Scott Lindroth introduced me to Andriessen’s music (Symphonie voor losse snaren, De Staat, Hoketus, De Tijd, De Snelheid, Flora Tristan, Hout) and I became an instant fan. These two composers, along with Martin Bresnick, are my main models.

I also am influenced by some works by Kurtág (Messages of the Late Miss RV Troussova), and Schnittke (Concerto Grosso, Choir Concerto). In a radically different aesthetic, I discovered the tintinnabuli music of Pärt in the 80s, which gave me hope and new ideas that it was possible to write new music that was radically different from the then accepted schools. I also am a great admirer of some works by my masters at Yale: Martin Bresnick (particularly Bucephalus, a wonderfully original and powerful string quartet in my opinion, as well as his Piano trio), and Jacob Druckman (his Aureole is particularly fine). Among the more recent composers, I appreciate and got ideas from some works by Dalbavie (Color), Turnage (Blood on the Floor), Adès (Living Toys, Asyla), Mackey (Gaggle and Flock, Indigenous instruments, Micro-concerto for percussion and ensemble), Lindroth (Stomp, Violin Duet).

I am an avid jazz listener, and play jazz piano myself (unfortunately quite incompetently, to my great despair). I particularly admire the pianists Evans, Brubeck, Jarret, Garland, Rowles, Monk, Tristano, Corea, Hancock, Blossom Dearie, Jamal; and, of course, the big leaders Miles, Nelson, Adderley, Coltrane, Ellington, or instrumentalists Erskine, Getz, Frisell, Metheny, Pass, Scofield, Martino, Abercrombie, etc

Stravinsky famously stated that he had been “the vessel through which The Rite passed”, and this really resonates, as this is the way I feel about composing: I am a vessel for whatever traverses me, and I put it out there, first of all for myself, because “I have to”, and then for the people who will do me the honor of performing it, and listening to it.

My ear has a very definite personality, and I constantly return to specific melodic contours, usually comprising my favorite intervals (fourths, fifths, seconds), something I qualify as pentatonism with a twist. I am very fond of colors in music, and I use a limited set of modes that I navigate in and out of, switch, superpose.

I suppose I also have a very bizarre approach to rhythm, and I struggle quite a lot with notating what I feel and hear. In my composition environment, I have several work stations: a desk with paper, a desk with the computer with several displays and a keyboard, and a dance floor. I try to dance my music, like I used to dance to The Rite when I was 12 years old.

Years of improvisation at the organ and the piano, years of improvisational dance, years of singing polyphonic music, the occasional jazz, funk, disco or popular dance thrown in, some eastern European rhythms, some concepts stolen from Ligeti, Andriessen, Kurtág or Lutoslawski, that’s the basis of my musical style in a nutshell. At the same time, my style depends a lot on the piece I write, and the instrumentation as well. Hard to categorize I’d say. And, although I try to make my performers happy and gratified, my music often remains difficult to perform, to grasp, as most of it is conceived to work as an ensemble, performers bouncing off each other, requiring a lot of listening and rehearsals. Will I ever learn?

I don’t like most of what is nowadays labeled contemporary music, particularly for its lack of colors. Everything based on what I perceive as noise instead of music just angers me. I really don’t think that any ‘art’ that tries to replicate the racket of garbage trucks, ‘music’ that contorts the use of classical instruments to systematically produce ugliness, and weird effects is worth my time or deserves to be called music. That’s quite a lot of stuff I don’t listen to. Not that ugliness doesn’t belong in art or music, but its overuse I find very tiresome. I have attended concerts when I have felt physically assaulted, or got so tense that I left the concert exhausted, angry and in need of a massage. I feel everyday life is already tough enough that I don’t have to submit myself to this kind of torture. I am always astonished what a certain public will listen to. Some composer affirmed: “only the extremes are interesting”, well, I guess he would judge my output rather tepid, however I do like my work to be a relief from the so-called reality out there (which interests me even less); so yes, I claim to write music to escape all this, a music that brings me elsewhere, definitely escapist music.

Béla Bartók famously asserted that “competitions are for horses, not musicians”. While I agree with the general idea, especially in view of the unfairness of the process in the general, the likely cheating, and the possible watering down resulting from board decisions, I must say that, as a composer without a career, competitions have often been a life saver for me, in that they provided motivation to get going during dry spells, be they of the writer’s block kind, or the no-commission or performances for five years kind.

I have had periods of my life where I was simply seized by inspiration (like when I wrote Soap Opera, for example) and was compelled to put pen to paper and just write. However, nothing works better for my inspiration than the perspective of being performed. Most often, a performer or a group will provide that motivation, but in periods of isolation and despair, I’ve often resorted to entering competitions, particularly anonymous ones, although that is no guarantee of fairness and honesty. I won second place in a competition where the first prize was attributed to a student of a member of the jury. So much for anonymity.

On occasion, competitions have offered me opportunities to redeem or save pieces from a permanent place in the trash or the shelf. In 2017, a French conservatory commissioned a piece for choir and cello but, once the piece finished, the person who had commissioned it unilaterally decided that she had other things to do and could not perform the piece neither this season nor any time in the future, a decision that didn’t please me too much. A few weeks later however, a competition in Finland popped up and offered me the opportunity to rewrite the piece (I had to shorten it for the competition), which became better, and I won first prize. It also offered me the opportunity to develop working collaborations with members of the jury, like Pasi Hyökki and Kari Turunen.

In addition, on the strength of this Finnish win, the artistic director of the Chœur de Radio-France got interested in taking a look at my production, and I got a commission out of that. So, sorry Béla, but competitions can be good sometimes.

I live very near the cemetery Montparnasse, which I often visit. So many greats are buried there, and while I can’t say that I talk to them (yet), I do enjoy spending time there, just thinking, just walking, and pausing occasionally. It’s quiet, beautiful, and sobering.

Few composers inhabit here: Camille Saint-Saëns, Louis Vierne and César Franck, (two musts for organists), Louise Farrenc, Emmanuel Chabrier, Vincent d’Indy, George Auric, Charles Koechlin, Jacques Ibert, Bernard Parmegiani, Henri Dutilleux. In popular or movie music, we find Serge Gainsbourg, Gérard Calvi, Paul Misraki and the lyricist Étienne Roda-Gil. Another must for organists: Cavaillé-Coll is here. A few musicians can be found, in particular harpist Lily Laskine, pianists Brigitte Engerer and Geneviève Joy (the wife of Henri Dutilleux), and violinist Didier Lockwood.

Visual arts are well represented with painters Chaim Soutine, Fantin-Latour, André Lhote; Man Ray, photographers Gisèle Freund, Brassaï; sculptors François Rude, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, Brancusi, Zadkine, Paul Belmondo and César, dessinateurs Serge Wolinski, Gus, Moebius, Reiser, and so many others that are unknown to me. That also is quite sobering.

Quite a lot of writers inhabit the space, some of them among my very favorites: poets Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, Desnos, Marcel Schwob, Tzara, Charles Cros, and Pierre Seghers, as well as poets known only to singers such as Catulle Mendès and Théodore de Banville, who helped publish the third edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, gave the eulogy at Baudelaire’s funeral and whose poetry was mocked by Rimbaud in Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos de fleurs.

Many wonderful novelists such as Maupassant, Pierre Louÿs, Marguerite Duras, Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (who still lived in my building when I moved in), Susan Sontag, Philippe Muray, Julio Cortazar, Alphonse Boudard, Emmanuel Bove, Roger Caillois, Emil Cioran, Huysmans, Jean Dutourd, Joseph Kessel, Roland Topor (also a painter and film maker), , Henri Troyat, Maurice Leblanc, the inventor of Arsène Lupin. Interestingly, several publishers are here: Flammarion, Hachette, Larousse, Maspero, Plon almost an encyclopedia unto themselves.

However it is the world of cinema that is most represented here, with directors Jacques Becker, Claude Sautet, Jacques Demy and his wife Agnès Varda, Maurice Pialat, Alain Resnais, Yves Robert, Gérard Oury, Éric Rohmer, Robert Enrico, Pierre Schœndœrffer, Alain Girod, Marcel L’Herbier, Frédéric Rossif, even Max Pécas (!); actors Philippe Noiret, Jean Poiret, Serge Reggiani, Jean Piat, Marcel Bozzuffi, Jean Carmet, Bruno Cremer, Alain Terzieff, Xavier Gélin, Alex Métayer, Philippe Léotard, and the most recent: Jean-Paul Belmondo); and actresses Delphine Seyrig, Jean Seberg, Michèle Morgan, Danièle Delorme, Mireille Darc, Valérie Benguigui, Sophie Desmarets, Anne Wiazemsky, Caroline Cellier, Juliette Gréco.

Henri Langlois is also here, co-founder of La Cinémathèque Française, where I spent so much time in my early adulthood, as well as Brach, screenwriter for Polanski and Annaud.

Many other famous people are here: choreographer Roland Petit and his wife dancer and actress Zizi Jeanmaire, astronome Urbain Le Verrier (co-discoverer of Neptune), mathematicians Coriolis (of the famous force) and Henri Poincaré, explorer Dumont d’Urville, le capitaine Alfred Dreyfus, automobile makers André Citroën and Jules-Albert De Dion, fashion designer Sonya Rykiel, Simone Veil (now moved to the Pantheon), philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon, many journalists and politicians (Deschanel, Quinet, Chirac, Bakhtiar).

Although the cemetery rarely bustles with activity, many of these tombs are often visited, and people leave tokens of their affection and appreciation on them, roses for Baudelaire, pencils for Marguerite Duras, subway tickets for Gainsbourg. There is a solidarity beyond death with the rest of the living.

Many of these creators have delighted my childhood and still delight my life, and it is at the same time humbling and comforting to go and visit them.