I love the freedom and the challenge: to make my own rules, and never to repeat myself.

Who

I've never been at home in one place, or in one kind of music.

I grew up practicing classical piano, obsessed with Schumann and Beethoven. But I always loved other music too, and I write to bring those worlds back together. For me, that means bringing different musical traditions back into the complex world of classical music. That is the way classical music always worked, until the last century. I write to reconnect it with people, with audiences.

Metal and classical Arabic music. Schnittke and avant-garde rock. The Prodigy and Björk's string albums. Brad Mehldau and Sviatoslav Richter. Orchestras, jazz players, pop producers. I was post-modern in my identity before I ever knew what it meant.

Without a single place to call my own, I move between genres and scenes. Each work has to make its own way to its audience; there is no shortcut — and each one allows me to connect with people I might never reach otherwise.

What holds it all together is not a style, but a question I keep asking: what is my voice needed for, and for whom, right now?

— Aviya Kopelman

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