Occupation: Film Score Composer Birth: January 31, 1937
I don't think I'm capable of making radical changes, but over a period of four or five years you can perceive very big changes, and they seem rather ….
I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the ….
So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That's not exactly b….
I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata throu….
I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people..
I always knew what I wanted to do and I did it..
I was a regular kind of academic music student. I was at Juilliard. I had to study all the contemporary music of the time, and changing that language….
It takes about a year to write an opera for me, but not a really a year of writing. I'm touring at the same time, and I'm playing, sometimes doing sm….
Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend were all living ….
Finally, ultimately, you write music for yourself. I mean, I need a public, I need people to play, I need everything else. I'm not working in isolati….
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, b….
I'd say it's just part of the world that we live in; it's part of the music world..
I've been working in theater, really, since about 1965. I started working with the Mabou Mines about then, and in a way I've always worked in the the….
Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinki….
I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a di….
My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy..
It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down..
The hardest thing about traveling is that mostly you get to a point - and it always happens on every tour - where you can choose between eating and s….
What I've noticed is that people who love what they do, regardless of what that might be, tend to live longer..
I find that people can’t find you. It’s kind of quiet. When I go to a city, I can almost always get a piano if I need one. So there’s something nice ….
The generation of composers that are just preceded me, people like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, [Pierre] Boulez, and, well, [John] Cage for that matter,[….