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

We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising.

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.

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.

You write it down because finally, when it's written down you do get it out of your system somewhat.

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

Besides merely some pleasure that we get out of the combinations of pitches together and lines, I think that there is some satisfaction that we get in the fact of having this diffuse thing organized very concretely and put onto a frame and have it actually decided.