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Since 1958 I have tried to develop a new form from the antinomy "same as - different from", or, as it is called in music, from "repetitions and variations", which are not additive or consecutive, but can be used simultaneously beside each other. This concept is based on a principle of order which can be described as "the constant variation through the constant repetition." Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, 1965 (in: Form in der neuen Musik, Mainz, 1966, S. 38)

What is new in our epoch, the spontaneity of art, tends to result in having a work of art connect directly with an idea. If this occurs in part in a nearly fully-developed musical piece, then it is related to more or less limited aleatorics. The spontaneity applied or required calls, from the point of view of composition, for graphical notation. This notation is based on the ambiguity of recording as it directs or, more importantly in my opinion, provokes spontaneity, as occurs in the case of "musical graphics". Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, 1962 (in: Zwischen Traum und Computer, 1971)

Imaginary music, which occurs in imaginary time; the time, which comes about simultaneously through itself. An imaginary sound, instead of a full orchestra sound in my works during the past years: a sound, which first came about as a thinning of an orchestra to 14 characteristic groups with 48 players only to be reduced to further to a chamber music instrumentation of 20 and then of 16. The most essential of the orchestra sound remains without tutti, without fortissimo, without the drama of crescendo and without the wistful ritardando. It is a new, tender, thin music freed of the clock's grid and sound structure of which seeks to find itself in new, unrepeatable vertical constellations.
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati zu "Invocations", 1990