You have to be very flexible,

In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, “This guy comes with us,” I think it...

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...

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.

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...

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...

Night Stalker.

[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...

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.

After Lewis and Clark

I just thought it was very interesting, … How do you write a 30-second piece? Everything is extremely compressed.

And then I went back to New York and found other people doing it. A handful of people.

The message in that for me,