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.

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.

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.

The world changes when there's music in it.

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.

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.

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.