The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.

Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.

When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.

We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.

Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.

Music has always been transnational.

What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.