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.

I can't say that there's a common practice that has to do with pitch language or with the way pieces are put together because today, anything is fair game. As far as I'm concerned, my own common practice is a piece that engages the attention of listeners from beginning to end, and doesn't rely on or expect the listener to zone out.

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

I think you'll find a significant number of people who decide not to enter competitions because their music just won't fit in that world.

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

I came to what I think of as the critical problem: the aging process of a piece of music. I noticed in the '70s that pieces I wrote would sound great the first time I listened to them and then on repeated hearings they sounded older and older until what seemed exciting and vibrant on first listening became stale.