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.

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.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

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

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

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.

Art is not only about angst.