"The finest music," Jennifer declares, "is the music of what happens." What happens can be badly-played air guitar, the forced whisper of your neighbors arguing, a violin prepared with card and clothes-pegs, a hurling commentator with a pungent Kerry accent, a brass band playing by the sea during a storm, the soft crunch of eggshells, a drunk howling on the night bus, the inaudible glissandi of feathers floating slowly down. I listen to and watch these sounds. They get soaked up, thought about, processed. Then I write pieces for passive-aggressive choir, procedures for smoothing air, an opera for Barbie dolls, ceremonies to placate dead drum solos, a sci-fi opera where the singers only make animal sounds, string orchestra pieces which behave as if the instruments were icebergs and frozen rain, cello solos which take place in the 1970s, indexes of hundreds of pop songs discharging in a minute, chamber music for water sprays, shoelaces and vitamin tablets."
