One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

it's important as a composer to sit in silence and imagine these complex musical worlds in your head, but it's also a wonderful experience to touch your music and to hear it and hear it in the room with you and to say, you can't have an entire orchestra there, but you'd kind of like to have the orchestra there.

The English learned, in my view, how to use harmony much earlier than the French or the Italians, or the Germans.

I think in many ways, the texture of technology actually diminishes human beings. It doesn't augment them.

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.

I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.