Steven Stucky

The general direction seems to be becoming fairly clear to me, but every new piece is a small adventure.

If you haven't heard my music before, 'Spirit Voices' is a great place to start.

Pulitzers are journalist-oriented, so the publicity machine kicks in for about two days. Then, you go back to normal.

Yehudi Wyner has reinvented for himself a Romanticism that somehow manages to seem like a step forward rather than a step back.

To some extent, I'm mildly surprised by every new piece, by the precise path that my interest takes.

I'm trying to do the exact thing Verdi or Mendelssohn did - open up that spiritual space where we can all be fully ourselves.

I don't think music teaches about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human being.

Whatever the raw material, the material itself is unimportant until it's catalyzed by emotional fervor. So in the ideal exchange between me and my listeners, they wouldn't 'figure out' my music. They would feel their pulse racing and the hair standing up on the backs of their necks.

We all need strategies for facing unknown repertory.

I do believe that the Chinese are becoming international leaders in showing the way forward for concert music.

One kind of artist is always striving to annihilate the past, to make the world anew in each new work, and so to triumph over the dead weight of routine. I am the other kind... who only sees his way forward by standing on the shoulders of those who have already cleared the path ahead.

The only way for me to compose is intensively. To pick at it over a long period doesn't seem to work.