I Shift Between Mediums Very Frequently. Instead

I Think It's A Great Handicap To Be Discovered At An Early Age. I Didn't Have That Burden Of Early Success. I Had The Much More Livable And Durable Career Where Success Comes Late, And Comes Slowly, And You Ease Into It. So By The Time It Comes, You're Ready To Deal With It.

It Takes About A Year To Write An Opera For Me, But Not A Really A Year Of Writing. I'm Touring At The Same Time, And I'm Playing, Sometimes Doing Smaller Projects.[the Opera] Akhnaten Fits In With Gandhi And Einstein, So That Forms A Trilogy In A Way.i Picked People Who Were These Kind Of Larger Than Life Characters, Who Kind Of Changed The World They Lived In By Almost The Force Of Their Personality And Their Inventiveness. People That I Think Not Only Do I Admire But I Think They're Admirable People.

Satyagraha Is An Opera Which I Wrote For The Netherlands Opera, So It Uses An Orchestra Of Around Fifty, A Chorus Of Forty, And There Are About Seven Soloists. The Opera ... Satyagraha Means Truthful, So It Was A Name [mahatma] Gandhi Used To Describe His Civil Disobedience Movement.

I Consider The First 20 Performances Just Learning The Piece. Think About It This Way: If You Think About A Pianist Who Plays A Schubert Sonata Through His Whole Lifetime - If You Listen To Rubenstein Or Horowitz Playing Their Repertoire Later In Their Life, You Understand The Richness With Which They Play That Music, And How Differently They Must Have Played It When They Were Younger.

The Problem With Listening, Of Course, Is That We Don't. There's Too Much Noise Going On In Our Heads, So We Never Hear Anything. The Inner Conversation Simply Never Stops. It Can Be Our Voice Or Whatever Voices We Want To Supply, But It's A Constant Racket. In The Same Way We Don't See, And In The Same Way We Don't Feel, We Don't Touch, We Don't Taste.