I'd say the differences are more interesting than the similarities at this point. Certainly no one would ever mistake my music for Steve's [ Reich].

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.

A new language requires a new technique. If what you're saying doesn't require a new language, then what you're saying probably isn't new.

What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.

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 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.

The problem with listening, of course, is that we don't. There's too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it's a constant racket. In the same way we don't see, and in the same way we don't feel, we don't touch, we don't taste.