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 don't think of my music as being about something.

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

Even today, I notice that some of my pieces are explicitly tonal; there are actually tonics and dominants. And then there are pieces that are not tonal. I tend to think that there's a dichotomy that has to do with the way pitches are structured.

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 was hired for a really excellent academic job early in my life; I was twenty-five when I started at Princeton and I got tenure early on. I really didn't deserve this; I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

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.