I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The main thing is that I've been studying composition for the last four years. I'd say it's the life experience combined with the lessons that enabled me to go much further.
I am fascinated by what is beautiful, strong, healthy, what is living. I seek harmony.
When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.
I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.
I think I compose as a listener: improvising and listening back excites me because I get to ideas that never would have occurred. Then I bring in the computers and samplers... and I begin to loop and process and change them.
I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.