There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.
Music critics have made it quite clear that any composer who ever contributed a four-bar jingle to a film was to be referred to as a 'Hollywood composer' from then on, even if the rest of his output were to consist solely of liturgical organ sonatas.
People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.
I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and '90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.
I don't ever consciously change gears when I play jazz or classical. It's all music.
I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.
When I composed, I heard my music played by the orchestra within days of completion of the score. No master at a conservatory, no matter how revered, can teach as much by verbal criticism as can a cold and analytical hearing of one's own music being played.
I don't even have a cell phone. I don't know how they work.
At MGM, you knew you were going to be working next year; you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had.
When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed.
John Williams is, without question, talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that.
I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.
I stuck around in Hollywood for too long. I was there a long time, and when I left, I was smart enough to realise that what I was leaving was not just the movie business. I wanted to get rid of the whole atmosphere.
I'm on very good terms with all my former wives.
I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.
I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.
I admire Elliott Carter endlessly. But I have no ambitions to emulate him.
Elliott Carter does not write the kind of music that the kids go off to school whistling.
I finally wasn't interested in writing music that played while actors talked.
A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.
