There is such a suspicion in today's world of people who do more than one thing, who aren't specialized.
Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
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.
We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.
With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.
This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.
This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.
It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.
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.
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.
As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.
If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.
In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
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.
Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.
I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.
I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
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.
I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.
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.
I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
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.
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.
