P. Those Joyce works--the texts that you used, and the works that were serial and twelve-tone--but in your own way--

D. They sound twelve tone. They're in the dissonant mode of the day.

P. Do you feel that you were doing that because you were being a good boy in terms of the kind of composer you were supposed to be--

D. No, absolutely not. Totally not. I wrote them with the same passion, totally passionate pieces that came out of instinct. It was just that I was excited by dissonance. And they're actually not at all like other atonal music of the time. The further you get from them, they sound--compared to tonality--they certainly are atonal. It's just that--

P. They have a very gutsy, direct sense to the listener. They're not intellectualized--

D. I hope so. I always think that the intellectual has to be in connection with some other visceral thing. I was following my instinct, but when my instinct went towards tonality, the whole tonal system, not just a chord or two, or not like Berio in Symphonia where something would emerge and then go away, in and out of a sort of dissonant string of notes. I started to have tonality--tonic, dominant, subdominant, and feel thrilled about writing it. That was the odd thing, I was feeling so thrilled. Like, what--? And I finally had to go with the thrill. I had to actually trust that it felt the same as it did when I wrote atonal music. So, for me it's got to be OK. I don't know what anyone else is going to think of it, but this is what's coming out.

P. It actually, for a time, surprised you ,what was coming out?

D. Very much so.

P. Do you think that the Lewis Carroll choice, the text itself, had to do with a style of writing?

D. On the surface it did, because it was a new set of emotions. I like that humor, charm, whimsy, rather than angst--German expressionism. But what attracted me to Lewis Carroll was the man. I didn't know Lewis Carroll. He was a man with a secret life. He had this secret illicit passion for little girls that was sexual. He found a way to hide it and be loved. And he did that through his books. So it was exactly a parallel for me. I found a way to hide being gay through my music, which was loved. That was it. And I didn't realize this until after I was well into it. Because I think, why do I like Lewis Carroll so much? I had no idea why I had this connection. It just was there. It's like your hand, you don't question it, it was simply in place, and I just had this feeling whatever he wrote, I could set to music. It didn't matter. And I think a lot of composers have that identification, like Lorca and Crumb, Heine and Schumann--some sympathetic thing. So for me and Carroll, that was it. A man with a secret life. And who knows what it was about. It was unclear, but it was very alive and very forbidden.

P. All of those intricate ins and outs--things that you found-- that are not on the surface of the story.

D. At that time, tonality was forbidden. Although this was not conscious. It was just an instinctual thing. It's interesting, I never thought about this, but my being gay had a lot to do with my whole development as a tonal composer and with my attachment to Lewis Carroll. Without that secrecy thing that I sensed between the two of us, who knows?

P. But also, from what I know of you and your personality--the whimsy, the fun-loving spirit, and also the two composers that you have mentioned, Milhaud and Aaron [Copland]. This sense of--not agonizing. Aaron used to say, "Agonizing is not my thing."

D. That was one of the great things about how Aaron was so helpful. He was another role model. Music could be natural and unagonized. He was terrific. Because I would be teaching at Harvard where everybody was agonizing. And then I'd go visit Aaron. Here he was, the best in the world, and he wasn't agonizing. He was saying it was just fun.

P. That's very much a part of your personality, it seems to me.

D. And he reinforced that. That's probably why we got along.