I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

Now there is no taboo; everything is allowed. But one cannot simply go back to tonality, it’s not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avant-garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avant-garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape.

There was a very famous musician in our family. He was a great violinist, an internationally known teacher. He was Leopold Auer.

Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully

New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock