I think my generation is a lost generation in a way.

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.

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.

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

I think my generation is a lost generation in a way.

I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known music to be available.

As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.