Music is the art that unfolds entirely in time and leaves no trace — the performance ends and the sound disperses, leaving only the memory of an experience that cannot be fully recalled or shared. To compose is to imagine a temporal architecture that does not yet exist and to write instructions for its construction by others, which is a strange kind of trust. What makes music move us is still only partly understood, which means every composer is working at the edge of knowledge about what it is to be human.
Each step builds on the last.