I don't think that those things [so called common practice] ever truly existed in the way that we like to believe that they do, the way we learn about them in music history class. Those things are defined at least decades after they happen. And even then, it's a fallacy because when you're in the moment, when you're in a thriving scene of musicians, inevitably everyone is going to be doing something completely different from everyone else

I want my music to be something that people use in order to access parts of themselves. So in that sense, every piece I write is about all emotions at once, about the lines in between. It's never only about one thing or another. It's emotionally getting at those things that we can't really describe - things for which we don't have labels. So yes, it's about something, and it has a use. It's neither about nothing nor about something concrete - it's about what you bring to it as a listener.

For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn't really confront.

I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude.

I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own that are stretched and pulled, and I do conceive of my music in a very narrative way.

It's only when it's smoothed out by history and we try to make sense of it - this incredibly complicated period when everyone's doing something different every day - that we look for those stylistic similarities and we say, "Well, that's what that was about," and sort of forget all the other nuance. I definitely feel that that's true for this time in my community of artists, and I'm sure that it was true at other times too.

If the music is good, and if it makes sense as a strong structure and as a drama, and things happen as a result of what happened before, not just as a string of unrelated events, then the question doesn't come up.