I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.

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.

I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it.

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.

In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with.

I'd say it's just part of the world that we live in; it's part of the music world.

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.