Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.

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.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

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 think we are in the process of getting the word out, and we haven't done very well yet. But we are trying.

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.