It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.

And at the same time, you are of course a performer, but it's very important that you understand that your role as a performer is to get the best performance from those wonderful colleagues that you have the chance to work with.

It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.

If we are able to get inside the music and inhabit it convincingly enough, it will cause everyone to find each other in this new psychological space. And that's most exciting.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

Being an American musician means being adventurous.

But a large symphony orchestra basically is a repertory company and it has a very enormous repertoire and it is important for the performers to be able to know how to shift focus so that they instantly become part of the sound world that a particular repertoire demands.

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.

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.

In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you'd go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you'd learn to sing a lot of songs.

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.

You know, they were returning to the language of the people and trying to use musical language, particularly as Copland did to create a musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them.

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

Conductors are performers.

But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.

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

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.

But if I can be convinced and then through the work that we do together, the orchestra can really be convinced of the big sweep of that communication that the piece suggests, then the audience will get it and it will be a good experience for all of us.

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.

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.

They are representations of many shared hours of collaboration between us all. That's the real nature of the relationship the orchestra and I are trying to build.

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.

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile.

Classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1000 years and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what its like to be alive.

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.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

If youre alive you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.

And what classical music does best and must always do more is to show this kind of transformation of moods to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think thats something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

Corporate partners help UNICEF fund our programmes for children, advocate with us on their behalf, or facilitate our work through logistical, technical, research or supply support.

Bambi has a profound effect on children because it's about losing your mother.

I love children and I love men, but I can't commit to either for the rest of my life.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

Public opinion polls are rather like children in a garden, digging things up all the time to see how they're growing.

For example, UNICEF works with governments to change legislation such as in India where a law was passed raising the age of compulsory school completion to keep children in school and away from the workplace for longer.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

When I see children, I see the face of God. That's why I love them so much. That's what I see.

We have three cats. It's like having children, but there is no tuition involved.

Instead of needing lots of children, we need high-quality children.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

I believe very firmly that gay people of every stripe and age should be role models for all children, and that means interacting with them.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

When you are getting ready to become a mom, being in love with someone just isn't enough. You need to think about whether he would be a good parent and raise your children with similar beliefs.

The real question isn't whether you love your kids or not, but how well you are able to demonstrate your love and caring so that your children really feel loved.

I am glad that I do not have any children.