Quintessential Whitacre

A couple indicative quotes from Eric Whitacre's forum.
www.ericwhitacre.com/theforum

About being a minimalist:

I don't really think of myself as being a part of a school of thought; I just try to write music that is honest, and part of me. When I truly look at my music as an outsider (difficult for me to do) it seems to me that there are dozens of influences, from minimalism to impressionism to cinematic film writing to 80's pop.

About tone clusters:

The clusters are just the way that I think about music, but my approach to them is like the rest of my writing: all intuition, no theory.

Ocatvio Paz said it best, in Spanish:"inocencia y no ciencia" (innocence and not science).