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.

But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.

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

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.

Satyagraha is an opera which I wrote for the Netherlands Opera, so it uses an orchestra of around fifty, a chorus of forty, and there are about seven soloists. The opera ... Satyagraha means truthful, so it was a name [Mahatma] Gandhi used to describe his civil disobedience movement.

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.

My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.