” On Sept. 15, I interviewed Professor Kurek by telephone. The following transcript of our interview has been edited for style and length. In the latter half of the 20th century, postmodernism abandoned unity and form in classical music, leading to a lot of compositional experimentation. What, if anything, was valuable about this period for your own musical journey? Because it paralleled my journey back to the church, it was useful to see the other side. It was the antithesis that taught me what I didn’t want and made me search for a role model of something I did want to emulate. But you don’t want to be completely derivative, and go back to sounding like Mozart, because as an artist you want to find your own unique voice and not sound like a cheap copy. How to do that was a decades-long process for me.