I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.

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?

I went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.

I feel that this is my artistic home, and I'm very happy to be a California artist together with many others who are not from here originally but who decided to make this the center of their activities. There's something about that that I find very inspiring and satisfying.

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

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.