Part of my big message with all this is that if you are alive, you know all you need to know about the message of classical music, because more than any other music, it is about the way life really is.

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

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.

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.

They are representations of many shared hours of collaboration between us all. That's the real nature of the relationship the orchestra and I are trying to build.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.