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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.