[This was the future, even if hardly anyone wanted to hear it. But, they were told, they shouldn't worry about that.] Acceptance would not come right away, but the history of music was going down this road and you either got on the train or you didn't, ... And if you didn't get on the train, you would be left behind. |
After Lewis and Clark |
And then I went back to New York and found other people doing it. A handful of people. |
European musicians didn't learn popular music, whereas in America we did, ... So you played in bands, you played in orchestras, you played everything. The high-art/low-art idea, that was a very European idea and not much appreciated in America. People like Cole Porter and Gershwin were considered very important composers. |
I just thought it was very interesting, ... How do you write a 30-second piece? Everything is extremely compressed. |
I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean. |
I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it. |
Night Stalker. |
The message in that for me, |
There were audiences for the first time in living memory. People were discussing modern music. Maybe they liked it and maybe they didn't, but the question of what we were doing suddenly became an urgent one. |
Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we're all living in different worlds because we're on different continents. |
What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music. |
You have to be very flexible, |