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.

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

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.

With a piece of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, on first listening I'm referencing it with other pieces by them that I know. I think that most people do this - they listen to pieces through the filter of pieces they already know.

It's always a thrill for me to see new versions of my pieces on YouTube.

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.