Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.

I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

Our industry [classic music] has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.