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.

There is more openness in LA to possibilities than on the East Coast of America. There is a pioneering spirit there that stems from the reason people went out there in the first place-to find something new.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.

The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.

I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?

Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.