By Dan Visconti
While I’d like to attend all the performances of my music, this is no longer even physically possible—so different from beginning student days, where every musical interaction, performance, and rehearsal took place under the auspices of the same mother institution.

By Dan Visconti
I don’t currently have any institutional affiliations so my commissioners are quite literally my employers for any number of months, which means that I am usually just a bit nervous to meet them.

By Dan Visconti
The sheer amount of stuff that is created during the course of an opera production is truly staggering.

By Dan Visconti
Opera requires two skills that are of supreme importance to all composers, but also skills that many composers find difficult to acquire.

By Dan Visconti
While our jobs as composers certainly aren’t easy, many of the grants or opportunities we sometimes apply for require comparatively less investment than, say, planning and paying for an entire trip and then performing in a series of ever-more-competitive rounds.

By Dan Visconti
The fact that remarkable music is at times created amid the most plebian and un-panoramic circumstances is one of the things that makes it even more remarkable.

By Dan Visconti
In all creative lives there’s a necessity to balance the internal and external

By Dan Visconti
One of the most important things I have realized about writing for the orchestra and other large forces is that, just as with Lego and Duplo, large ensembles can’t really be handled like small ensembles simply blown up to scale; they generally call for much broader gestures.

By Dan Visconti
This might seem trivial and obvious, but I compose the kind of music that I want to listen to myself, and also the kind of music that I’d want to play if I retained any meaningful facility on an instrument.

By Dan Visconti
A function of my particular circumstances (composing mostly acoustic music for live performances) is that after a huge, tense period of composing in which my mind is primed, there is usually a long hiatus (sometimes as much as a year) before rehearsals, which frequently tend to be not much before the premiere date.