With repeated listenings, a piece eventually becomes its own being. I very often say to students that this is like meeting a person for the first time. When you first meet someone, you reference that person with others who are similar; but, as you get to know that person better, you begin to understand his unique qualities.

It's always a thrill for me to see new versions of my pieces on YouTube.

I had been creating music on tape that was to be listened to as a recording, rather than through performance.

Very often, when you're listening to a piece for the first time, you're listening through a model of other pieces that you know. At a certain point, a piece becomes idiosyncratic and you start to understand it on its own terms.

I came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time!

When you have performers, there's the uniqueness of live performance and what performers do in concerts.

I think of myself as experimenting with different ways of structuring pieces. A lot of it has to do with the computer, of course.