I love silence. And one of the paradoxes about the way I live and also about my work is that definitely one of the reasons I went into music, and especially into composing is that I love setting up an environment where I can be by myself for long periods of time and have everything as quiet as possible, either to think about sound, or to think about ideas, or just to focus on things that are important to me.

England has had a lot of really bad periods of music, but it's had several amazing periods where they've found an incredible balance, not just between music that's a rather complex and also pretty direct. Like the Beatles.

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.

There's just an incredibly rich and interesting relationship between our listening to music and the way our minds engage.

There were a lot of things happen in the mid-'80's that all of a sudden made it possible to do a lot of very quick interactive music.

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

I think that one of the things about music is it's supposed to be spontaneous, it's supposed to be real human beings bouncing off of each other whether its from the stage or to the audience, or jamming with friends.