I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.

Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.

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.

The one obvious thing is that the devices are so good now that you can also see their limitations extremely well.

One of the big mysteries of music is, if you take music without words, it means something to us because we know it's about something. It's about something important humanly, but since there are no words, nobody knows what it's about.

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 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.