I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.

Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

I realized that the European dogma is not necessarily the only way to look at things.

When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.

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 was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.