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

My perspective on the academic world is very favorable. I did certain kinds of things that I could never have done otherwise.

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 think you'll find a significant number of people who decide not to enter competitions because their music just won't fit in that world.

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

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'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.