"These works have changed me. I think it's allowed me to show more of my humanity."
"There is the part where you're dispensing knowledge to people, but there's the part where you actually inspire them to do something."
"Having played a lot of his music, that it feels remarkably good to play at the instrument, which makes a lot of sense given his virtuosity."
"No one can play bass and sing like esperanza. Who can play all those flutes like Clare? The minute that they stop playing the piece it's gone."
"Malhaars are ragas that are designed to beckon rain...am I somehow beckoning the thing that I am trying to write about the disappearance of?"
"So much of what I've learned from these writers, from these musicians of the past, makes me the artist that I am today."
"I think if composers are being honest, whenever we assign a program to abstract instrumental music, we're always doing a little bit of myth-making."
"I just wanted people to experience this music in a primal and hypnotic way. Kind of going back to what made us fall in love with music in the first place."
It wasn't just his tenor voice, but there was something bordering on ethereal about his singing. Perhaps it was his 3-1/2 octave range that first grabbed me.
"Her music has that sense of being arresting and shakes us up. But it also just sounds so right and so organic."