I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.
My music has always been strong in melodic content.
There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.
Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
The soprano has all those other instruments in it. It's got the soprano song voice, flute, violin, clarinet, and tenor elements and can even approach the baritone in intensity.
The 'Rhapsody' has a lean, modern, American feel about it, whereas with Rachmaninoff's second and third concertos, you feel very much you're still in old imperial Russia.
I like inventive melodies and chord changes, a little bit of creativity.
I suppose I was affected by raw sounds and timbres more than a lot of other composers. Had I been involved with orchestral composing, I think the aspect that would have most endeared me to that field would have been the orchestration.
I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.
I often use triadic arpeggio forms within my riffs and solos as a tool to create rich-sounding, poly-chordal sounds.
There are rules that are so blatantly broken on 'Contra,' like structures of harmony and texture.
The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.
I think I have a sound or a certain feel in certain harmonies in the way I construct melodies.
They both changed the way we hear the sound of the piano, both of them inventors of sonority: Chopin took bel canto singing lines and reproduced them on the keyboard above richly upholstered counterpoint; Debussy somehow preserved vibrations in the air, blending their ephemeral magic into music that reaches far back into deep memory.
They're not particular about whether you're playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it.
I love The Edge's guitar style; it is unique. There is an ancient world resonating in his guitar sound.
The piano has a huge dynamic range that almost no other instruments have. It can play very low, and it can play very high.
