I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

The Northern idea of form is more of a process. The various units of the form overlap. You can't tell where some things stop and new things start. This is typical of Sibelius.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.