When I record, it feels like I'm in a bubble. There's nothing else in my head right then. It's just that song, and I'm trying to really sound like what the song is about.
I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.
The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized in the modality of being.
The concern of the musician is to play the music. It is there demanding to be given sound to.
I was hearing music in my head and trying to play it on the clarinet, but it didn't match.' Then, literally the first day, it did with the saxophone. I was like, 'Oh man, that's what I've been trying to do; this is what it's supposed to sound like.'
The music usually occurs to me as a complete sound, and then I have developed the skill of being able to translate that into a fully realized song.
I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.
it's important as a composer to sit in silence and imagine these complex musical worlds in your head, but it's also a wonderful experience to touch your music and to hear it and hear it in the room with you and to say, you can't have an entire orchestra there, but you'd kind of like to have the orchestra there.
