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.

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

Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it.

I'm trying to phase out my availability on the phone. People call you when you're walking down the street and say the most random stuff.

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.

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.

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.