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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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