The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction.

When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.

Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.

So: we're all tired. Now what? Manuscripts written in Club Med?

There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.

In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.