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

Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it's actually exhausting.

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

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.

After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.

I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.