Anything that we love seems to always come out in some form or another, but once it gets into your brain, these things get processed, and they come out in new shapes and forms.

I was composing before I realised I was a composer. It came more or less naturally. There were a couple of old ladies lived next door to me, and I frequented their house more than I did my own, because it had all those marvellous things in that that old ladies do have. And they had a piano, and I used to play around with that; they showed me how to read music and I used to play to them.

It never occurred to me that there was anything odd about writing my own music, and so I used to just jot down little ditties and things like that. And it was only in later years I suppose when I was about nine or so, that I realised there was this thing called composing.

I use music as something from which I obtain some form of - I hate to use the word spiritual - guidance, an awareness of something more than the day-to-day or the petty. I am not reading Emanuel Kant to try to embark on a task of seeing if I can understand myself, what the aesthetic experience is. But I wholeheartedly believe in it, even though I think not too many do nowadays.

The one thing I never did, I was never strict in my techniques. I might have pretended in the past at times that I did work serially, or something like that, but I never did, it was always I let my ear tell me what to do.

Anything that we love seems to always come out in some form or another, but once it gets into your brain, these things get processed, and they come out in new shapes and forms.

I had great difficulties learning to play initially because I could not think rhythmically properly, although it's an even-paced rhythm, I was not phrasing properly, I was too Western. It took me a while to learn to think in needed form, and the only way I could learn was just by ear.