When I was listening to When Crows Gather , the composer that came into my mind was Charles Ives . Oh, big one for me. He was another New Englander , of course. Well, Ives, enormously, and not just because of, sort of, the New England stuff. The freedom to layer things in Ives is something that I've loved about him from the very first music that I heard of his.
Nothing's off limits to compound, and unlike things can live together and so on.
That's a deep idea to me. Yeah, you know, so interesting that you should mention that. He is a very, very important figure to me. But, well, I, my heroes are, I mean, some of my basic heroes are the same ones that any composers, you know, the giants of this century, you know, the Viennese composers and Stravinsky , and, less so for me the sort of, earlier American composers apart from Ives. I mean, the whole, sort of, you know, Virgil Thomson end of things is a part of American music that just doesn't interest me very much.