My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, 'Hear me clap, hear the music.' I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear. ↗
The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment. ↗
But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places. ↗
I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind. ↗
The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me. ↗
If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed. ↗