When I was a young woman, there was a very dogmatic tradition, in that if anyone wrote in tonality, one was pushed aside by the professional establishment…my child-rearing years solved this problem until it became much more lenient. The desire to transfer feelings and experiences into sound that can be communicated to others is the ‘ground bass’ for all composition. My response to the extraordinary beauties of the rose, for instance, tries to capture the rapture, regret, nostalgia of that flower. The poetry about the rose that I couple to the music is highly charged and I use ‘radical tonality’ to get to its essence. I work like a sculptor with sound surfaces, chipping away until there is a correspondence, a proportion that resonates.