We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

There is more openness in LA to possibilities than on the East Coast of America. There is a pioneering spirit there that stems from the reason people went out there in the first place-to find something new.

I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.

Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.

Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.

I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.