Every piece of music should be looked at as a painting that dissolved
off the wall when you closed the gallery door. If all the colors
dripped down into a huge pot and you took this pot, along with a recipe
of how to reassemble the colors back into Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers,' you
would be very careful to get all the reds and the yellows in the right
places, and not to paint it bigger or smaller than it was. I think
music carries with it this responsibility. [1985]