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In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.
Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.
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.
I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.
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