This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

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

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.

Our industry [classic music] has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.

There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.