Any Beatles song is perfect. It gets to you right away.

I've done a lot of operas. I've probably done more different kind of operas than anybody.

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

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.

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.

All the music we know that's popular is actually commonly shared music that takes things that are similar about all of us.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.