I began composing when I was eight years old and have always thought of myself as a composer. I studied at the Eastman School (1961–65) and at the University of Michigan, where I received a DMA in composition with a cognate in ethnomusicology in 1969. Although I received good and useful instruction in composition from my teachers, I was almost completely self-taught—by listening to music, studying scores, reading advanced literature on music, and above all, composing almost every day. As my compositional interests evolved from writing contemporary music influenced by Bartók, Stravinsky, and Hindemith to music influenced by Indian classical music—as Cowell, Cage, and Hovhaness had also attempted to compose—to absorbing the techniques and aesthetics of European serial music, and to composing scores that included optionary forms and improvisation, certain compositional problems came to my attention. My solution was to invent compositional techniques to solve them. This took me momentarily away from my scores into a more abstract world of musical thought. By the time I finished my graduate training, I had experimented with various formal compositional techniques I invented or adapted from the music of composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, Brown, and Cage.

When I went on to teach at Yale University in 1969, I came in contact with the work of the first generation of American professional music theorists, since Allen Forte was on the faculty and had established in the graduate school one of the first PhD programs in music theory. To my surprise, I found that his set theory was more or less isomorphic to the system of classifying and relating sonorities I had come into contact with at Eastman in 1963. Thus, it was possible for me to understand and be influenced by the most up-to-date writings on twentiethcentury music. This not only led me to invent and employ similar sophisticated compositional methods, but also resulted in a resurgence of my interest in non- Western music, a preoccupation that had already been stimulated by my studies of Indian and other world musics at Michigan. As a result, I found myself writing technical articles that were eventually published in scholarly journals.