What Came To Me As A Revelation

I Consider The First 20 Performances Just Learning The Piece. Think About It This Way: If You Think About A Pianist Who Plays A Schubert Sonata Through His Whole Lifetime - If You Listen To Rubenstein Or Horowitz Playing Their Repertoire Later In Their Life, You Understand The Richness With Which They Play That Music, And How Differently They Must Have Played It When They Were Younger.

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.

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 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.

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.