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.

You practice and you get better. It's very simple.

I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean.

The generation of composers that are just preceded me, people like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Pierre] Boulez, and, well, [John] Cage for that matter,[Morton] Feldman ... That was a kind of experimental music that was very isolated. It had no real public.

I don't think I'm capable of making radical changes, but over a period of four or five years you can perceive very big changes, and they seem rather small at the time.

I like the idea that [Mahatma] Gandhi is appearing now in an opera hall in all these different places, and people kind of think about it again.

I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.