Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

Hopefully, I have a certain amount of what you call musical talent.

I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music.

Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear.

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.