Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.

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.

Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.

If somebody had told me when I was starting composition in Helsinki in the '70s that I would end up in L.A. and to describe that journey, those 17 years with the philharmonic and building the hall and this and that, I would have said, "This is a fairy tale of the first order."

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.

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.