Tyshawn Sorey is a New York based composer and drummer (tyshawnsorey.net).

"Listening to yourself listening, experiencing your experience." That is a great line from Mr. Sorey, talking about the length of a piece. Sometimes a piece of music gives us a sense of flow, a continuity that cannot be broken by splitting the piece into two or more parts.

In short pieces you still feel time passing, whereas in long pieces you lose the sense of time: the piece becomes timeless and you can really dive into it. Personally, I love composing long tunes, but I think people prefer short pieces because they want to pin everything down.

Mr. Sorey also encouraged drummers to learn piano and to compose. History is full of works by drummer-composers that are underestimated or ignored. I agree.

He has a rhythmic and melodic approach to composition. He does not think of improvisation as a mere succession of "facts" or "events," but as a cycle, and, I would say, as a kind of speech. In fact, he played along with a recording of a radio program. It was very cool.

I loved it when he talked about experiencing new sounds. Just dropping cymbals on the ground produced different overtones.

Lessons learned:

• explore your instruments for new sounds and different overtones.
• try not to repeat yourself. As Lee Konitz would say, be a tabula rasa every time you play, or at least add something new each chorus.
• try splitting the pitches of a chord across different octaves to give them new relationships (a good idea to compose on).
• vary your setup according to your taste, the situation, and what the music asks for.
• try using electronics.