I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own th….

I have this ideal listener, as John Cage did. This listener doesn't bring expectations that my music will fit into some part of music history, or tha….

There's some ambient music that doesn't do anything. I wouldn't say that that's narrative. It is narrative in that it creates a sort of world where n….

I feel like there's not this black-and-white division between concert hall music and music that bands play in a bar. I don't know if this was ever tr….

There are some superficial things that connect me to the stream. There's instrumentation, there's timbre, use of electronics, the way that samples ar….

I'm not religious, but I've always been attracted to the rituals of religion; as a kid, Sunday church was the closest thing I had to an interactive, ….

For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotio….

If the music is good, and if it makes sense as a strong structure and as a drama, and things happen as a result of what happened before, not just as ….

I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that….

I don't think anyone listening to my music needs any special knowledge. They don't need to have a background in contemporary music. They don't need t….

I write my music with the idea that it will appeal to all of those people, and I want them to go in with all the history that's within all of us - al….

The goal is that people will find something of themselves in it. But you don't need to know what a hexachord is! You don't need to know what serialis….

Of course I love when people are quiet, but I also love when people are comfortable. I love when people emote. The flip side of having a totally sile….

I don't think that those things [so called common practice] ever truly existed in the way that we like to believe that they do, the way we learn abou….

I want my music to be something that people use in order to access parts of themselves. So in that sense, every piece I write is about all emotions a….

It's only when it's smoothed out by history and we try to make sense of it - this incredibly complicated period when everyone's doing something diffe….

Sometimes you feel some artists are doing the same thing that you're doing but in a different field. But they have the same approach. Their method of….