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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.