The American new music scene is remarkably vibrant.

My interactions with musicians have been simply that: interactions with musicians. Issues of gender, or anything else beyond the music-making, have in my experience played no role in whether or not a musician has been able to articulate my intentions as a composer.

While I believe there is certainly a phenomenon of timelessness in art, the people writing today can comment on today in an exclusive manner.

I was fortunate to work with Corigliano for a few years in the mid nineties. Meeting and working with him during those formative years was an important experience.

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.

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.

A lot of my approach to the instrument, especially as I've gotten older, is to treat the piano in ways that are not very pianistic - to consider the sounds I'm after first, and to deal with technical considerations later.