I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you're really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument.

I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.

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 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.

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.

A piano is a machine, but you've got ivory and there's weight behind the keys and you have this really - you feel the resonance in the instrument, you feel the vibration in the pedal. I mean, these a still very crude.

I listen to a lot of music that teenagers are listening to because I'm around them.