I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.

Pop is totally results-oriented and there is a very strong feedback loop.

Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.

Things that are very popular are not taken seriously, because the snobbish side of one says, "Well, if everyone likes it it can't be that good." Whereas if only I and a couple of other people like it, then it must be really something special.

It's amazing how quickly people get used to bad quality.

There is a sort of convergence starting to happen between the computer and musical instruments, but it's still quite a long way off.