Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

For me, great music doesn’t just have to fall into one category or one genre and I love appreciating all kinds of music.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

I’m so happy I discovered early how wonderful music makes me feel.

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

When you’re thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

Classical – perhaps I should say ‚orchestral‘ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

I could care less about the particular. I like to make music.

I’d love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.