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Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.

I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.

The fact that the theatregoing public likes my music is no credit to me. There are many other composers who write better music that the public doesn't like.

Music is a performance and needs the audience.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.

With a musical, you kind of have to do a mind-meld with the book-writer, the lyricist, the composer, the director - sometimes the producer. I think that's a reason why musicals are the hardest form.

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.