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

What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?

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

I don't like listening to my music, not even new pieces. Generally, they sound pretty much like I expected them to sound, so it's what I wanted, and that's it.

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.

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