I didn't want my music to be seen as examples of an electronic culture; I just wanted them to be thought of as pieces of music.
With a piece of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, on first listening I'm referencing it with other pieces by them that I know. I think that most people do this - they listen to pieces through the filter of pieces they already know.
I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.
I think you'll find a significant number of people who decide not to enter competitions because their music just won't fit in that world.
I've had a lot of fun writing percussion music. It feels quite similar to writing computer music. But I found myself in the role of choreographer in a way, worrying about physical movement and such.
I had been creating music on tape that was to be listened to as a recording, rather than through performance.
The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.
With repeated listenings, a piece eventually becomes its own being. I very often say to students that this is like meeting a person for the first time. When you first meet someone, you reference that person with others who are similar; but, as you get to know that person better, you begin to understand his unique qualities.
I was very fortunate to be at a wealthy institution. I do recognize the drawbacks and limitations of the academic world but it's basically the world I grew up in and there's no way in which I would have been able to survive in the so-called real world.
If the music has a logic of its own - as I think my music has - an open-minded listener will apprehend and understand.
I can't say that there's a common practice that has to do with pitch language or with the way pieces are put together because today, anything is fair game. As far as I'm concerned, my own common practice is a piece that engages the attention of listeners from beginning to end, and doesn't rely on or expect the listener to zone out.
My perspective on the academic world is very favorable. I did certain kinds of things that I could never have done otherwise.
I found myself recycling ideas and I saw that I had to invent reasons to compose a piece rather than start from some exciting idea.
I don't think there's something that you have to 'get' with my music. It tends toward the dramatic side rather than the narrative.
I don't think of my music as being about something.
Very often, when you're listening to a piece for the first time, you're listening through a model of other pieces that you know. At a certain point, a piece becomes idiosyncratic and you start to understand it on its own terms.
I've been really fortunate to have Bridge Records interested in publishing my music for the past 25 years. Most of my music is available in their catalog.
There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do.
It's very interesting for me to listen to music with my wife. She's not a musician but she very often makes comments about pieces in ways that are similar to what I'm thinking.
I came to what I think of as the critical problem: the aging process of a piece of music. I noticed in the '70s that pieces I wrote would sound great the first time I listened to them and then on repeated hearings they sounded older and older until what seemed exciting and vibrant on first listening became stale.
It's always a thrill for me to see new versions of my pieces on YouTube.
I think of myself as an experimentalist even though much of my music sounds logical and normal, in a sense.
I came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time!
I think of myself as experimenting with different ways of structuring pieces. A lot of it has to do with the computer, of course.
I was hired for a really excellent academic job early in my life; I was twenty-five when I started at Princeton and I got tenure early on. I really didn't deserve this; I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
