It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. ….

As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught….

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time..

It makes sense to invest in new work. It's almost like having a research department in a scientific laboratory. You have to try things out. You'll ma….

Over the years I have tried to develop something which is technically assured..

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viol….

One thing I'm doing on the new Titanic recording is actually bringing in different acoustic spaces..

I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles..

Somehow in the 20th Century an idea has developed that music is an activity or skill which is not comprehensible to the man in the street. This is an….

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century..

What was once underground is now coming to the surface..

Music history has flowed under the bridges for many years..

Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the c….

I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece..

The virtuoso element in jazz playing, all those very fast runs in the upper extremes, simply doesn't appeal to me. That's why I don't want to make m….

When Philip Glass asked me if I would be interested in doing a new recording of Jesus' Blood he assumed that I would do something similar to the firs….

I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technolo….

I work very fast, keeping the ideas flowing but making sure they come out the way I intended..

People like Arvo Part would not have been taken seriously 20 years ago..

Similarly you can make a transition from one set of instruments to another imperceptibly..

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all..