Complexity and Stuff

While there are countless conceptions or definitions of complexity, there are two sorts of complexity that are probably most relevant to music. One is basically quantitative: the impression of complexity due to the amount of stuff squeezed into a piece. The other is qualitative and due to wonder about how the stuff, whatever quantity there may be of it, is connected, within and without the world of a piece. While a composer can certainly push an extreme of quantity up or down into a state of inescapable wonder, my own taste certainly runs more in the direction of pushing quality to extremes, where wonder is an option, not forced.