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].

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

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

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.

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.

If you're alive, you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.