Pop music, which I deeply admire and wish I could play better than I can, is based on expressing one mood, one feeling at a time. Classical music is by its very nature involved with different kinds of music, constantly transforming one another, which is more akin to the way our experience of life really is.

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

If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know [about music].

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.

Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years, and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

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.

The world changes when there's music in it.