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.

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.

Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.

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.

Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.

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.