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.

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.

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.

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 found myself recycling ideas and I saw that I had to invent reasons to compose a piece rather than start from some exciting idea.

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.

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