Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers

Do today's composers draw inspiration from life experiences or from, say, the natural world?
What influences, past and present, have influenced recent composers?
How essential is it for a composer to develop a personal style, and when does this degenerate into self-repetition?
These are questions about which some of the most important composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century often have quite strong feelings--but have seldom been asked.
In this pathbreaking b…