I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

I like this idea of identification with the local team. I think it's great. That's what an orchestra should be. It's an orchestra for its hometown, and it serves the people.

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 realized that the European dogma is not necessarily the only way to look at things.

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

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.

When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.