When I got out of college, I tried to write 12-tone music. But it just didn't agree with me. It was at Harvard that Beveridge met the influential French teacher Nadia Boulanger, who invited him to study with her in Paris. Appropriately, she discovered him not as a composer but as a singer. For Beveridge, the two are inseparable.
Composing has to be a logical extension of the performing art.
It's improvisation that's rapidly written down. Beveridge frequently writes at a rustic Maine cottage built by his father. I just sit there and write at a desk. I hear it in my head. He prefers not to sit at the piano until he's revising and polishing the work.