With chamber music you can get people who work on the music for months, rehearsing it every day for a couple of hours, and if they get it in a different way than you do, which is entirely possible, it's not as a result of anything other than their good musicianship.

There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the page that encourages it to be played in a certain fashion.

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.

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.

As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.

For me the best kind of film music is liturgical music. Liturgical music is essentially a million scores for the same film.

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