If You Don't Have A Basis On

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.

Theatrical Times Are Different From Concert Times, To Put It Simply. Taking A Figure Like [mahatma] Gandhi And Setting Him On A Stage Requires Thinking About What Theater Is About And What The Whole Experience Is About And What We're Trying To Communicate In That Way, So You Get Into Certain Less Abstract Considerations.

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.

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.

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.