The way I listen to music goes in waves depending on a lot of things. How busy I am, if I'm in between composition projects, if I'm starting a new project. So, the only time I listen to the radio for music is with my daughter's when I'm driving them to school, or driving them somewhere.

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.

I think it's maybe because Sergeant Pepper's came out when I was about 13 or 14 and that was a pretty impressionable age, and it was such a kind of radical period. But that period of the Beatles really had a big influence on me and I think are directly related to hyperinstruments.

One of the things I like most of all is being in my study, in my barn, with absolutely no sound anywhere thinking about something. It's extremely important to me.

I row for about 40-45 minutes every morning and put in my iPod and it's a huge range. That's when I listen to either things that I just love and know very well and just want to pay attention, it's also where I listen to things that are new that I want to get to know.

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.

That's the definition of popularity. Something that literally resonates with many, many people.