Einstein saw that music was a window into the unknown.

Our traditions of composing and making music are hardly winding down—we are in a turbulent period and are finding our way, perpetually at the front edge of history, leading and not following.

As a composer and presenter of music, I operate with the faith that the arts and ideas change people, transform them, and open them to greater sensitivity, tolerance, and humanity.

For most individual artists, the subject of grants and awards can touch sensitive nerves. Whether one retains a philosophical distance to the possibility of winning one, or gets knots in the stomach wondering if a …

I don’t consider myself that old, but I’ve never got the bug for interactive video games. The games I’ve seen my young male relatives and friends playing, from the vantage of a disinterested voyeur, seem …

It was in 1939 that John Cage declared, “Percussion music is revolution.” Fifty years later in 1989, he was asked to write a preface for a book about percussion, and it was here that he …

I’ve always wished that contemporary music generated the same kind of critical discourse that the visual arts do. In fact, I find that I need to read visual art criticism to get a sense of …

I wonder if a discussion of a contemporary common practice will in not too many more years seem rather quaint and curious. The discussion of this on these pages is quite wonderful, and I think …

The topic of music and nature is open to many perspectives, if only because the breadth of nature includes so much we still do not understand. When I was young I thought that my life’s …

I keep a New Yorker cartoon on the wall next to my desk: one Roman says to another, “I started out here on drums years ago, and I never dreamed I’d wind up in …