Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.