In Order To Arrive At

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 Balancing. Actually, Writing In Hotel Rooms Means That I'm Refusing To Deal With The Problem.

The Problem With Listening, Of Course, Is That We Don't. There's Too Much Noise Going On In Our Heads, So We Never Hear Anything. The Inner Conversation Simply Never Stops. It Can Be Our Voice Or Whatever Voices We Want To Supply, But It's A Constant Racket. In The Same Way We Don't See, And In The Same Way We Don't Feel, We Don't Touch, We Don't Taste.

Theatrical Times Are Different From Concert Times, To Put It Simply. Taking A Figure Like [mahatma] Gandhi And Setting Him On A Stage Requires Thinking About What Theater Is About And What The Whole Experience Is About And What We're Trying To Communicate In That Way, So You Get Into Certain Less Abstract Considerations.

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.

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.