Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire. |
For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me. |
I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all. |
I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory! |
I'm not suspicious, I'm just careful. |
I've been living with the minor second all my life and I finally found a way to handle it. |
If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost. |
In a kind of middle-aged crisis, it dawned upon me that there was a possibility that music might not even be an art form. |
Just what the hell is the experimental tradition? |
Most people think what could I do, I think what shouldn't I do. What I should do perhaps is involved with the fact that I'm Jewish and what is known as Jewish paranoia. I don't feel comfortable enough to feel that everything is on my side and that it's going to work just the way I want it. |
Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures. |
No one has the Houdini school of composition. |
Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians. |
The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others. |
This business about being flung out of paradise is his gift to me. I'm glad I got out; it was getting too hot in there. |