Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.
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.
In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.
The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.
I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.
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.
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.
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.
This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.
The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.
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.
Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
There is such a suspicion in today's world of people who do more than one thing, who aren't specialized.
