The function of pop music is to be consumed.
Conducting is more difficult than playing a single instrument. You have to know the culture, to know the score, and to project what you want to hear. Some conductors are well prepared but cannot transmit their ideas to an orchestra, and others are good communicators but have nothing to transmit because they are not absorbed enough in the score.
I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience.
The most difficult problem in conducting is intonation. You must know what is wrong and how to correct it.
My parents were so far from the music world that they couldn't conceive how you could make a living. But for me, it was the only solution for the rest of my life.
In business, in the music world, people know that I can be very friendly and warm but that, after a certain moment, the business is closed. I like to be alone: in order to concentrate on my work, the social life does not exist. It has never existed for me, really. I have chosen instead the working life because I prefer that.
'Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta' is a kind of expansion of chamber music.
Some members of the Vienna Philharmonic convinced me to try Bruckner, which I have never done before. And that was interesting to me to have this experience with this orchestra, which knows the repertoire very well, and to be confronted with this knowledge, and to learn from them.
I discovered 'Rite of Spring' when I was 21. As a matter of fact, not with orchestra first, because it was still a work which was not often performed. Don't forget that I was 19 in 1944, still the Occupation time. So it was performed slightly after the end of the war, in 1945.
