An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.

You don't underestimate either players or audience in any circumstances.

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work.

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.

At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking your head against a brick wall.

There’s no card, business card, better than a compact disc for a composer. It doesn’t half impress people and they get a long way on it ... these composers they will get more performances, more commissions, more recognition just by having that disc