My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.
The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.
The theatre only knows what it's doing next week, not like the opera, where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.
The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes.
This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it.
When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.
When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18.
When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.
My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.