When I write music, I'm thinking: Is it keeping me, is it keeping me, is it keeping me? There is a focus and drive and forward motion in every piece that I've ever written.

Much of my early music veers more towards the power of sound----there is fire and aggression, a wild unraveling, where's it going to go? What's the world that I just walked into? It's like entering into a state of being. That's what I've been interested in--entering into a state of being.

I was always musical as a kid. I studied the piano, playing Debussy and Beethoven for hours. Sometimes I'd play old show tunes and my mom would come in and sing with me. Later I made music on anything I could get my hands on--mountain dulcimer, flute, congas--trying music from all different traditions. Dance, theater, voice--I was drawn to the arts that involved a direct communication with an audience, and I was drawn to the intensity of that communication.

When I started writing music, I knew immediately: this was it. Music satisfied all these interests. It's intellectually challenging, it's emotional, it's physical. The physical aspect was especially important, I think, initially. You construct music, you play it, you get it through your body. Right away I got the bug.

I began writing music for theater and co-founded the Wild Swan Theater, a theater collective, in 1980. Eventually, my interest in more complicated and sophisticated compositions led me to study at Yale, where I found my voice and began to make my own path. With Bang on a Can, which I co-founded in 1987, I began to create a community, joining forces with like-minded people and developing a vision in my own work.

All the music that I love is a part of the music that I write, but often it comes out in totally unrecognizable ways. Beethoven is a big influence, but the element in his work that I respond to is not so much about harmonic progression or even form, it's about the timing, a kind of anticipation, how he keeps you hanging on, delaying the resolution. When I wrote Four Marys, I was thinking about Appalachian music, but it doesn't sound at all like Appalachian music. I was thinking about the way a dulcimer is played, that raw sound of the slides. That element--the moment of the slide--is charged to me and becomes the basis of a whole piece.

More recently, sampled sounds have become a strong part of my language, sounds found in the world like car skids, glass breaking, radio static. I've been listening to music in a different way. It's not just about the sum of all the notes, it's starting to be about experience, how you experience things. Sound is so much a part of memory and experience and association. I'm taking the associative or charged energy that a sound has and using that as a building block with which to make music. There are great possibilities for a new kind of harmony--a harmony not of notes but of sounds.

Writing music is always about breaking through. I like to keep challenging myself--new combinations of instruments, working with different media. Lately I've been composing longer pieces, creating a bigger experience that is less momentary and more engulfing.

­from an interview with Deborah Artman