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.

Sometimes I imagine that there's a binary division going on in contemporary practice that has to do with chromatic versus diatonic. I notice that I tend to listen in a diatonic sense, that I register a pitch as a member of a diatonic scale, even in a non-tonal context.

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!

I've had a lot of fun writing percussion music. It feels quite similar to writing computer music. But I found myself in the role of choreographer in a way, worrying about physical movement and such.

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

I don't think there's something that you have to 'get' with my music. It tends toward the dramatic side rather than the narrative.

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.