I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known music to be available.

Riding a horse is a relationship with a foreign creature, and with musicians it's a similar thing: "OK, I'm going to put something on the page that will spook you into rushing." Little games you can play.

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.

When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.

My urge, when I go to the store, is to buy everything. And it's the same when I'm composing. My first instinct is basically to bring the whole store home, and not make a decision about how things play out.

Whenever I get asked to write orchestra music or music that is for a lot of players, I try to make it a little sad.

Even more than in the concert hall, in church there are things you can and cannot do, just out of respect. You would never have the sound of someone being nailed to a cross, or the sound of a child being born, because everybody knows the story. We know that we're meant to feel a complicated raft of things.