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

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

I think of myself as an experimentalist even though much of my music sounds logical and normal, in a sense.

Even today, I notice that some of my pieces are explicitly tonal; there are actually tonics and dominants. And then there are pieces that are not tonal. I tend to think that there's a dichotomy that has to do with the way pitches are structured.

It's very interesting for me to listen to music with my wife. She's not a musician but she very often makes comments about pieces in ways that are similar to what I'm thinking.

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.

I've been really fortunate to have Bridge Records interested in publishing my music for the past 25 years. Most of my music is available in their catalog.