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.

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.

I have a strange situation as far as my name is concerned, because of course, what should my name really be? Is it my traditional Jewish name? Or this curious name my parents put together, partially to honor departed family members, and partially to keep me away from the absolute craziness of my grandparents' fame and the intrusiveness of their fans? So many people call me "MTT," and some do say, "Oh Maestro," and some are comfortable calling me Michael.

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

Thank God for movie music. It preserves the rich vocabulary in classical music through challenging times.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

The real deep text of music and the whole reason that it has continued with the profundity and urgency that it has for over a thousand years, has to do with what the notes say, what the notes witness, different experiences of hope or doubt that people are able to distill and encode and pass on in this way.