You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights. ↗
Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations. ↗
When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then. ↗
With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them. ↗
I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head. ↗
I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time. ↗
The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn't really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn't going to compose Beethoven's Fifth. ↗
