“As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression.”

I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music.

Finally, it is the communicating link between the screen and the audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience.

I feel that music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety, or misery. It can propel narrative switftly forward, or slow it down. It often lifts mere dialogue into the realm of poetry.

Your views are as narrow as your tie.

Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques,

My two years with Dan Szabo at the New England Conservatory were indeed a gift — he is a pianist with unlimited potential and a composer that makes my heart sing. I deeply feel that he is an important musician for the coming years.

Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro.

The model of a composer.

I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

I have written six symphonies, they are smaller-scale works. I seem to emit my themes, work them out, combine and intertwine them, and then come to a close. I usually feel that there are no superfluous extras, but probably most composers feel that way about their works.

The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.