If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

I think art can reflect tragedy.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.