I am referring to your lecture presented at the "Europe-Asia" festival in Kazan in April 2000. How is this trend of new music accepted in Britain and Europe?
CLARKE: I mentioned that the music of the majority of British composers is often performed in Great Britain and seldom in mainland Europe. Among these composers, I could name Peter Maxwell Davies and James MacMillan. However, there also exists a smaller group of composers, whose music is performed more often in Europe and seldom in Great Britain. These are, for the most part, the composers who make up the trend known as New Complexity. It includes Britain's most famous composer, Brian Ferneyhough, as well as composers of a younger generation, such as James Dillon, Richard Barrett and myself. Most of the composers in this group have an international but not a local reputation; their works are frequently performed in Europe and elsewhere in the major festivals by the most prominent contemporary music ensembles. However, it is very rarely that their music can be heard in Britain. Occasionally, maybe once every few years, the BBC Symphony Orchestra will programme something by Ferneyhough or by Dillon, just to pretend that they are not biased, but this music is mostly ignore in Great Britain.
ROVNER: Do these composer live in Britain?
CLARKE: Most of them live in Britain, except for Ferneyhough, who has taught for many years in the USA, first at the University of San Diego in California, and now at Stanford University, and Barrett, who lives in Germany.
ROVNER: Could you describe the stylistic features of the New Complexity style? What are some of the main principles of this style and how does your music fit into it?
CLARKE: The New Complexity style, as its name implies, aims to enrich the musical language in a maximal or inclusive manner, leading to a very complex type of music - complex both in the immense technical requirements made of the performers, and in the extraordinarily large amount of musical material and information presented. The New Complexity style pays great attention to detail and precision; the performers are required to perform extremely intricate, refined instrumental material individually and produce the most complex polyphonic combinations together, all of which adds up to create a whole macro cosmos of sound. A large amount of information is presented within each short period of time, which is certainly not the case in more simple music. The music could sometimes be likened to a big city, where an enormous number of events take place simultaneously. It is like the human brain, with a complex combination of different thoughts and reactions happening. Generally speaking, I think that it is a mistake to try to over-simplify things. There are relatively few certainties in life and there are few in this music; there are always questions being asked, for which it is not always easy to give immediate answers. An extreme opposite trend to this one would be the new religious composers like Arvo Part and the British composer John Tavener, who write very simple music, and who have perhaps one question, to which they feel they know the answer.
The whole article read in Musician I 2010.