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.

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

In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really about.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

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.

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