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

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.

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.

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

The way you survive in the performing arts is by having a sense of your audience, and doing things which entertain and satisfy the audience, but in a more important way, cause the audience to question many things.

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.

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.