Akhnaten is kind of a dark, kind of mysterious character. We don't know a lot about him - a lot of information on him was lost. But he obviously was a kind of iconoclast of him time. I guess I'm attracted to people like that. Like [Albert] Einstein also, who radically changed our way of thinking about the world we live in.

I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people.

If you don't have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.

Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend were all living in different worlds because were on different continents.

There's almost no content in terms of language at all. I don't like using language to convey meaning. I'd rather use images and music.

What I've noticed is that people who love what they do, regardless of what that might be, tend to live longer.

I was a regular kind of academic music student. I was at Juilliard. I had to study all the contemporary music of the time, and changing that language very radically was just a sign or a signal that I was going to try to do something very different. I find that that's what I feel closest to. I found no real inner response in me in a non-tonal language.