Very often when I go in to meet for movies or pilots, I'm put on videotape. I hate the notion that that tape is going to sit on a shelf and never get better.

The simple act of sitting down and playing something enormously complex and spiritually uplifting on a harpsichord just bores kids to tears. There's no sizzle, there's no grab. But it's the great lesson of serious music, that it invites you to listen, rather than demands that you listen.

I am certainly not a mainstream religious man.

Something happens to us all when we experience something as a unit that doesn't occur when we're on our couches or holding our little portable DVD players.

People ordinarily don't think of their orchestras as important as we'd like them to be. People don't care about their friends and neighbors who sit down to commit excellence three or four times a year, but they will go see the tall bald guy with three names from television.