I'd studied piano first and switched over to cello when I was about seven. I played mostly chamber and solo classical music. I got really involved with rock music when I was a teenager. I wired up my cello.
You have to train your mind and your ears, but they're more like athletic skills. So, part of music you just have to learn those things or you can't practice the art.
I think part of the bad thing is that skill is emphasized so much that a lot of people, by the time they get to Juilliard, well I think they kind of forget why they got into music in the first place and if they're performers - this is a simplification, but a lot of them are trying to win a competition and play more accurately, or better, or more beautifully, whatever can be measured, than somebody else.
After a year, I thought gee I don't really need college anymore, which wasn't correct, but that's what I thought.
I went to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a year, which turned out to be a really vibrant, very intensive intellectual atmosphere where you could do a lot of aspect of music without it being a conservatory. And that's why I went there.
I have a big barn that I converted to my music studio, so I go there early in the morning and the first thing I do is rowing. And that's when I listen to a lot of music.
I row for about 40-45 minutes every morning and put in my iPod and it's a huge range. That's when I listen to either things that I just love and know very well and just want to pay attention, it's also where I listen to things that are new that I want to get to know.
I had grown up and gone to high school in New York, so I wanted to get out of the east coast.
I listen to new music by composers who are interesting to me. I listen to some; I don't know if I want to call it pop, but it's some interesting artist that gets my attention, I listen to in the mornings.
Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's.
England has had a lot of really bad periods of music, but it's had several amazing periods where they've found an incredible balance, not just between music that's a rather complex and also pretty direct. Like the Beatles.
One of the big mysteries of music is, if you take music without words, it means something to us because we know it's about something. It's about something important humanly, but since there are no words, nobody knows what it's about.
Over my career, I'd say the last 25 years; we've gone from music and computer being for 10 people in the world to having personal computers, to now being able to do amazing things on your iPhone, or with Rock Band. So, right now there's enormous capability with technology in our devices that everybody has access to.
The one obvious thing is that the devices are so good now that you can also see their limitations extremely well.
I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.
A piano is a machine, but you've got ivory and there's weight behind the keys and you have this really - you feel the resonance in the instrument, you feel the vibration in the pedal. I mean, these a still very crude.
Why does every society seem to want to make music when it often seems like kind of a frill.
That's the definition of popularity. Something that literally resonates with many, many people.
I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.
I think in many ways, the texture of technology actually diminishes human beings. It doesn't augment them.
I listen to a lot of music that teenagers are listening to because I'm around them.
One of the things I like most of all is being in my study, in my barn, with absolutely no sound anywhere thinking about something. It's extremely important to me.
One of my interests in music has always been what it means, why it affects us the way it does.
The Beatles realized that what they were making in the studio could never be performed. And they had already given up on performing because there were too many screaming fans and they were playing in larger and larger venues so they couldn't even hear what they were playing, it just wasn't any fun any more.
I love the cello, I love the physical sense of an instrument that's about the size of your body that vibrates enough that even if you play an open string, you feel it.
