I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.

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

After a year, I thought gee I don't really need college anymore, which wasn't correct, but that's what I thought.

My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voices - so I do consider it an opera.

I love the cello, I love the physical sense of an instrument that's about the size of your body that vibrates enough that even if you play an open string, you feel it.

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

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.