“Personal style is fed by a multitude of of collective currents; we are the focus, the crossing point of intersecting trends, of colliding waves. Our own work, then, is a mirror of a great deal that hails from somewhere else.” Henri Pousseur gave that answer in 1983 to Bálint András Varga as part of Varga’s project to ask the same three questions to sixty-five then-contemporary composers [Google Book], and it serves as a good jumping-off point to get into his style. Pousseur unquestionably has a distinctive musical voice, but a core component of that voice is the bringing together of what would at first seem wholly incompatible elements.