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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Because I had been in conservatory for so long, I was jealous of my friends in bands.