I wrote a lot of software to do various kinds of special things, and I loved the idea of composing pieces in an electronic studio.
When you have performers, there's the uniqueness of live performance and what performers do in concerts.
Even today, I notice that some of my pieces are explicitly tonal; there are actually tonics and dominants. And then there are pieces that are not tonal. I tend to think that there's a dichotomy that has to do with the way pitches are structured.
Sometimes I imagine that there's a binary division going on in contemporary practice that has to do with chromatic versus diatonic. I notice that I tend to listen in a diatonic sense, that I register a pitch as a member of a diatonic scale, even in a non-tonal context.
I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.
