The musical culture in the United States has no doubt suffered severe setbacks, especially in funding, since the early 2000's. However, I've been amazed at the resiliency of those involved with contemporary music in this country. I think composers and those dedicated to contemporary music have reacted with tremendous creativity and resourcefulness.

I don't think performance out of duty yields very much. Coercion is never the way to go.

As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.

My own goals center around writing the best music that I can, and only I can determine whether or not I've succeeded in accomplishing that.

The proliferation of new music groups and individual performers focusing on new music today is heartening. On the one hand the culture is very resistant to new things, and yet it continues to change and grow.

A healthy dialogue is always good.

I think the tendency to paint composers or styles of music with too broad a brush - for example, identifying composers as writers of "simple" or "complex" music - has become increasingly problematic and is almost never productive.