Because I had been in conservatory for so long, I was jealous of my friends in bands..

I'm pretty clear about what I'm capable of doing..

As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing t….

Even more than in the concert hall, in church there are things you can and cannot do, just out of respect. You would never have the sound of someone ….

I didn't entertain the idea that my music would ever become available in any of the ways that I had previously known music to be available..

For me the best kind of film music is liturgical music. Liturgical music is essentially a million scores for the same film..

Every couple weeks I'll listen to Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, just to check in, to see how it's doing. It's doing OK..

I think my generation is a lost generation in a way..

Riding a horse is a relationship with a foreign creature, and with musicians it's a similar thing: "OK, I'm going to put something on the page that w….

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people..

I'm trying to phase out my availability on the phone. People call you when you're walking down the street and say the most random stuff..

My urge, when I go to the store, is to buy everything. And it's the same when I'm composing. My first instinct is basically to bring the whole store ….

Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality..

In really fancy restaurants they never point to the bathroom, they just gesture toward the bathroom or they'll lead you to the bathroom. The fancier ….

Whenever I get asked to write orchestra music or music that is for a lot of players, I try to make it a little sad..

When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone….

Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF an….

There's a lot of violence in Beethoven not explicitly suggested by the notes or in his markings, necessarily. There's just a way that it looks on the….

With chamber music you can get people who work on the music for months, rehearsing it every day for a couple of hours, and if they get it in a differ….