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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.