Don't expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live.
In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.
In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really about.
Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply.
When I speak of "cycles," I am referring to lengthy intervals of relative homogeneity, if not in the resolving of problems, than at least with respect to the consistency of their capacity to productively irritate.
Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view.
The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
The idea that I had anything to do with speaking about Islam or about the Muslim world was just absurd to my family. . . . I hadn't been to the mosque in like 10 years.
In order to be a friend to anybody, you have to be a friend to yourself. If you're not a friend to yourself, there's no way you're gonna have any friends.
The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy.
Speech is the best show a man puts on.