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.

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.

Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.

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.

I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.

Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed.

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?