I Always Knew What I Wanted To

It Takes About A Year To Write An Opera For Me, But Not A Really A Year Of Writing. I'm Touring At The Same Time, And I'm Playing, Sometimes Doing Smaller Projects.[the Opera] Akhnaten Fits In With Gandhi And Einstein, So That Forms A Trilogy In A Way.i Picked People Who Were These Kind Of Larger Than Life Characters, Who Kind Of Changed The World They Lived In By Almost The Force Of Their Personality And Their Inventiveness. People That I Think Not Only Do I Admire But I Think They're Admirable People.

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.

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.

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.

I'm Interested In What Happens To Music When Other People Use It. Whereas There Are Composers Who Don't Like Anyone To Touch Their Music, I Think People Should Because They Do Things I Can't Think Of.