Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

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 think art can reflect tragedy.

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.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

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