It will take a lifetime to answer that question, because it has to do with what is passed down from one generation to the next. But I would say that my background enabled me to become a composer. Not many sons of blue-collar workers end up having creative jobs. My upbringing may also have helped me to keep different kinds of music making in perspective. I've always thought that the sound of a crystal glass isn't the same in a Montreuil squat and an Ircam concert hall, and you could say that its meaning changes, too. The important thing is that the music takes flight and that a moment of collective eroticism occurs between the musicians and the audience. In a certain way, it's the musician who shakes things up, unlike other situations in which specific rites and traditions govern how things are done.
I'm naturally a rather sedentary person, but I've made music in many different settings: classical piano, jazz, singing in a children's choir, conducting a big band, salsa, rock, Klezmer music, batucada, tango, film music, ken (mouth organ) in deepest Laos... all of these cover a wide variety of socio-cultural contexts, each of which is filled with emotions and specific musical signs.

I think the road is long to feeling really comfortable with music. One should never give up being a curious music student, and working towards becoming an all-around musician one day. Both activities are a part of me. They were in conflict, and possibly still are in conflict today.
Composing means shutting oneself away for months on end in an unrelenting, impossible quest for the perfect object. It means trying to surpass oneself, which is a thrilling process. Improvising and playing an instrument mean learning to control the instant, attempting to rein oneself in while at the same time feeling a strong and rather unsettling wish to touch the listener. Composing means hiding away, while playing makes a more immediate connection with the listener.

Machines - or more specifically, compositional aids - give me greater flexibility in conceiving my rhythmical structures. You first have to learn how to enter your ideas into the computer, which acts as a sort of immediate mirror. It used to take two weeks to write down a rhythmical structure. Once I'd done that, I just didn't have the heart to call anything into question. With the computer I can hear an "idea" almost immediately. This is an extremely formalist approach, but things can be twisted around and mixed up by changing just one step in the algorithm. You simply push a button and everything changes. The problem is to choose the right button, and that's where intuition comes in. When you use a computer, the score becomes a huge piece of highly organised modelling clay.

You can be « trashy » and still have a beautiful sound! Miles Davis can be incredibly « trashy ». I recently made the rather severe choice to limit my palette as a composer to three ingredients: a note, a duration and musical Time. This will surely change in the future, but to be honest, I'm a bit tired of music written according to a system that's dripping with effects and new playing techniques. It's been forty years since Lachenman wrote "Pression pour violoncelle", which was an important breakthrough at the time, but the way it presented "beauty through refusing routine" has turned into a routine for a lot of composers. I simply feel the need to do something else.
Everyone is free to choose his own mode of expression, of course, but I don't think the various dogmas and movements have done more than create short-lived sensations and caused a lot of ink to be spilled. They may have helped, though, in allowing those who aren't part of the creative process to feel included, and in this context the idea of a movement does make sense. Artists are often too arrogant about their esotericism. Choosing musical material and a specific aesthetic don't strike me as terribly important, though, and to refer back to sociology, they may have more to do with social reasons, with strategies for making oneself stand out. The important thing is experiencing the power and the tension in the associations among the different sound elements that make up a piece. This is where the composer's work acquires meaning. It can be tonal, modal, trash, rhythmic, spectral, whatever...it doesn't matter one way or the other. But when I encounter a work that the composer really believes in, I'm glad to play the game of letting myself be surprised, letting my imagination interact with the composer's ideas. Sometimes it's a feminine feeling of letting yourself be submerged by the music; sometimes it's more masculine, a kind of voracious attempting to figure out how the work was put together. What the rabbis began to write the Talmud in the first century, they believed in it and put considerable energy into it. The artist faces a similar problem: believing in what he does in order to be able to truly create. This is known as sublimation in psychoanalysis.

Since the score hasn't been premiered yet, I'd rather not say anything about how efficient I've been !
I'll try to sum up the project, though. At the beginning of the piece, three musical lines of contrasting temporalities (from slow to very fast) appear one after the other in a way that resembles Stravinsky's writing, but is a little less rigid (it's all relative!) because a kind of bridge leads from one musical block to another. As the piece goes on, the blocks become longer and longer and the three musical lines reach a paroxysm one after the other. The idea was to superimpose the blocks in a sort of dense ocean of sound that causes the listener to lose control, enabling him to choose among the various musical signs and design his own music. I hope I've made things a bit easier for the listener by designing everything he hears in a way that helps stock information in the short-term memory. So the listener loses control in the midst of sound environments that are familiar to him.
You could compare it to an obsessive thought that comes back hundreds of times: "Am I going to do it ? Am I going to go ? Yes, no, no, yes"... until you let yourself go and are surprised by what actually happens instead of what you were expecting to happen.
One of the most beautiful things in life to me is this perpetual back and forth between what we can and can't control, between reality that resists our efforts and limitless imagination.