26 July 2026, Montaldeo (Italy)

I often ask my students why they have chosen a particular sound, a certain gesture or a specific technique. Very often the answer is simply: “Because I like it.” Or: “It feels right.” This is what we usually call intuition. Not a lack of thought, nor the absence of reflection, but a decision that precedes explanation. We recognize something before we are able to explain why.

In this sense, I have always considered myself an intuitive composer. At the same time, I have never believed that intuition alone is enough to compose a piece.

Like many composers, before I begin writing, I spend a long time reading, researching and constructing the conceptual world of the work. By the time I write the first measure, I usually know which questions the piece is asking, which materials belong to it, which images surround it and, perhaps most importantly, why I feel the necessity to write it in the first place. None of this is intuitive. It is the result of a long process of thinking. Intuition enters only afterwards. It accompanies me while I move through the material, allowing one decision to lead to the next. It tells me when a gesture still feels alive, when a sound has exhausted its possibilities, when something should continue, when it should stop or when it should transform into something else.

Over time I began to realise that intuition belongs almost entirely to the composer. It reveals something about the person who is writing, but not necessarily about the work itself.

This is why, while composing, I try to reach a point where I can stop listening to my own intuition and begin listening to the material instead. Material changes. It develops relationships that were not there at the beginning. It slowly constructs its own internal necessity. At a certain point, the question is no longer whether I like a certain solution, but whether the material itself requires it. At the beginning of the writing process these two things often coincide. Later they slowly begin to separate.

If I never questioned my intuition, I believe I would continue writing very different sonic environments with remarkably similar temporalities. Because what intuition seems to carry most deeply is not my taste, nor even my musical preferences, but my own experience of time. It carries the moment at which I instinctively feel something should change, the amount of repetition I naturally tolerate, the point at which I become impatient, the speed with which I expect something to happen. These are profoundly temporal decisions, yet they shape the material itself. In this way, intuition continuously reproduces my own relationship with time.

This made me wonder what intuition actually is.

I think intuition is one of the slowest things we possess. It takes years to become what it is because it is continuously shaped by everything that surrounds us: the books we read, the music we listen to, the films we watch, the works of art we encounter, conversations, friendships, landscapes, grief, joy, disappointments. None of these experiences tells us directly how to compose, yet together they quietly transform the way we perceive what feels convincing, necessary or inevitable.

For a while I thought intuition was simply another form of memory. But memory suggests that experiences remain fundamentally unchanged, waiting to be recalled. That is not how intuition feels to me. Every new experience seems to alter the meaning of all the previous ones. A book I read today changes the way I understand a book I read years ago. A work I encounter now changes the way I hear music I thought I already knew. Nothing is simply added to what is already there. Every new experience changes the position of all the others.

Perhaps intuition lies not in our experiences themselves, but in the constantly changing relationships between them. Every new encounter quietly transforms everything that came before it, so that what once seemed central becomes secondary, and what once passed unnoticed suddenly becomes indispensable.

This also explains why I have often had the feeling that I need to experience something before I understand it. Understanding does not necessarily precede composition. Sometimes it follows it. Sometimes intuition has already changed long before thought becomes aware that anything has happened.

This became particularly evident while writing my most recent work, into a world that is pure blue (where you are transformed utterly and forever) ((Amen)). For many years I thought primarily about sound. I was convinced that sound itself would generate the work’s temporality. Of course I always knew that music unfolds in time — every composer knows this — but my attention remained focused on sound, trusting that temporality would emerge as its consequence.

At a certain point something shifted.

Through encounters with theater, literature, dance, and visual art, I gradually became aware that what we actually offer an audience is not primarily sound. What we offer is a particular experience of time. Every work creates a temporality that did not exist before it, a way of inhabiting time that belongs only to that work.

It was less a discovery than a shift in attention.

The moment temporality itself became the object of my thinking, rather than something generated by sound, my intuition could no longer function in the same way. The questions I asked while composing changed. Instead of asking only what a sound should become, I found myself asking what kind of time this sound was asking the listener to inhabit. Looking back, I think this is why I was finally able to write a piece lasting more than thirty minutes. It was not because I had learned how to sustain a longer form. It was because my own intuition had begun inhabiting another temporality.

Perhaps this is why I continue trusting intuition without allowing it to have the final word. It carries the entire history of my perception, but it also carries my habits, my preferences and my own experience of time. At some point, if a work is to become itself, it has to begin resisting the person who is writing it.