Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know [about music].

Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years, and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where "now" actually is.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

There is one thing you need to do to people who hate you for the way you are and what you do. What's that? The thing you do best. And that would be? Give them hell.

In a balanced viewpoint that includes both masculine and feminine perspective, healing is seen not as a technique, but as a process.

Women tell time by the body. They are like clocks. They are always fastened to the earth, listening for its small animal noises.

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.

I love performing live, especially when I get in the zone. But the studio is really becoming a place I have grown to love.

Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.

I would love to say how nice it is to see you again, but that would be a lie. And I am nothing if not honest.

the best leaders try to train their followers themselves to become leaders. ... they wish to be leaders of leaders.

Using painting as a metaphor for consciousness is what I'm interested in.