Art & Creativity Quote by Lukas Foss

Foss is naming the quiet scandal at the heart of a lot of electronic music: it can arrive as a finished object rather than a lived event. Coming from a composer who grew up inside the rituals of concert life, he frames “performance” not as mere execution but as a moral and sensory condition - bodies risking something in real time. “Loving immersion” is telling; it’s a phrase that smuggles devotion into aesthetics. He isn’t asking for virtuosity or spectacle so much as the human feedback loop: performers listening, adjusting, sweating, failing slightly, then redeeming the phrase on the next bar.

The subtext is also generational. Foss came of age when the authority of Western art music depended on presence: the hall, the players, the social contract between stage and seats. Early electronic music often severed that contract. Tape pieces and studio-built works displaced the drama of interpretation; the “work” became the recording, not the night. For a composer steeped in rehearsal culture, that can feel like losing the second author of music: the performer as co-creator.

He’s careful, though, to say “I miss” rather than “it lacks,” making the critique personal rather than doctrinaire. That softens what could be a reactionary stance into something more intimate: a confession of taste rooted in how he experiences meaning. Foss isn’t denying electronic music’s craft or imagination; he’s admitting that without the visible act of making - the risk, the communion, the shared concentration - the music doesn’t fully hook into his sense of what music is for.