By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

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.

I distrust anything that you don't hear.

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.

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.

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.

Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing.