The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.

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

Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

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."

Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.