 Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that. |
| I feel very free and very happy to be a composer. |
| Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other. |
| The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself. |
| There is more openness in LA to possibilities than on the East Coast of America. There is a pioneering spirit there that stems from the reason people went out there in the first place-to find something new. |
| The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself. |
| I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad. |
| The Northern idea of form is more of a process. The various units of the form overlap. You can't tell where some things stop and new things start. This is typical of Sibelius. |
| This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous. |
| My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting. |
| Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is. |
| The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster. |
| I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky. |
| In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences. |
| I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so. |
| I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly. |
| I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music. |
