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.

I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.

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

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!

My perspective on the academic world is very favorable. I did certain kinds of things that I could never have done otherwise.

There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do.