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

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

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.

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

There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do.

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.

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.