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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.