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'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.

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.

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

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

I didn't want my music to be seen as examples of an electronic culture; I just wanted them to be thought of as pieces of music.