The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.

Art is not only about angst.

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.