Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.
With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.
The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself.
This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.
Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
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.
In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
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.
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.
This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.
I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.
The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.
Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.
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.
