For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.
We've been listening to Wagner, which is so great.
Serious music usually doesn't pay.
For me, the exhausting thing about touring is the sitting around, which is why working on my concert music is really great - and also seeing concerts and seeing friends and, whenever possible, getting out to see a museum.
I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries.
In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience.
I do believe that the Chinese are becoming international leaders in showing the way forward for concert music.
I think every classically trained film composer feels to some extent, maybe on some level, that they took the low road, that they could have maybe pursued a career in the concert music world, and perhaps been involved in a higher quality of music.
I love doing concert music.
I think I'm really part of a whole generational movement in a way. I think a lot of other people since and during this time have gotten interested in writing what we can still call experimental music. It's not commercial music. And it's really a concert music, but a concert music for our time. And wanting to find the audience, because we've discovered the audience is really there. Those became really clear with Einstein on the Beach.
Concert repertoire is some of the most beautiful music ever written, and I frequently seek out opportunities to perform it.
I love jam bands, but I still like a three-and-a-half-minute rock song.
I started out coming from more of a concert music background. It just turns out that 20th-century music techniques lend themselves to scary movies and horror movies.
I'm a fan of 20th century orchestral music, the experimental avant-garde composers of the '50s, '60s, and '70s. In horror movies you can write music that if it was performed on the concert stage would have the audience running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. But in a movie all of a sudden it becomes incredibly accessible and appreciated.
I know that the classical world has resisted film composers throwing their hat into the classical concert music ring. And you know I don't think that's totally without justification. I think sometimes it seems to me there is a built in automatic prejudice against the whole idea of it. And it's very difficult to overcome that stigma.
