One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where "now" actually is.

This extraordinary group has absolutely captivated my imagination, knocked my socks off - what more can I say?

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

When I was a kid, three years old, I couldn't walk by the piano without reaching up and trying to play a few notes on it. There are kids who are just drawn to listening to music and dancing to it and trying to conduct.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.