Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.

I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.

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.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

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

I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.