I was very fortunate to be at a wealthy institution. I do recognize the drawbacks and limitations of the academic world but it's basically the world I grew up in and there's no way in which I would have been able to survive in the so-called real world.

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 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.

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

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

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

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