On his music and its reputation for complexity: “I’m not sure it’s complex. Contrapuntal music always has many lines coming together. What you’re hearing you should not analyze in detail – you’re hearing the total effect. This is not very different from classics, like Mozart… It may sound like some random piece of writing, but it isn’t at all.”
And: “To put it bluntly, when my second quartet was played here at Harvard, my old teacher Walter Piston said to me, ‘you know, if I knew what it sounded like, I would have put the four players in separate rooms and shut the doors.'”
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