I Like The Idea That

Satyagraha Is An Opera Which I Wrote For The Netherlands Opera, So It Uses An Orchestra Of Around Fifty, A Chorus Of Forty, And There Are About Seven Soloists. The Opera ... Satyagraha Means Truthful, So It Was A Name [mahatma] Gandhi Used To Describe His Civil Disobedience Movement.

I Like The Idea That [mahatma] Gandhi Is Appearing Now In An Opera Hall In All These Different Places, And People Kind Of Think About It Again.

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 Very Radically Was Just A Sign Or A Signal That I Was Going To Try To Do Something Very Different. I Find That That's What I Feel Closest To. I Found No Real Inner Response In Me In A Non-tonal 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 Smaller Projects.[the Opera] Akhnaten Fits In With Gandhi And Einstein, So That Forms A Trilogy In A Way.i Picked People Who Were These Kind Of Larger Than Life Characters, Who Kind Of Changed The World They Lived In By Almost The Force Of Their Personality And Their Inventiveness. People That I Think Not Only Do I Admire But I Think They're Admirable People.

I'd Say The Differences Are More Interesting Than The Similarities At This Point. Certainly No One Would Ever Mistake My Music For Steve's [ Reich].