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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.