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.

Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality.

I'm pretty clear about what I'm capable of doing.

Every couple weeks I'll listen to Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, just to check in, to see how it's doing. It's doing OK.

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.

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

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.