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.

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.

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

My urge, when I go to the store, is to buy everything. And it's the same when I'm composing. My first instinct is basically to bring the whole store home, and not make a decision about how things play out.

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

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.

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.