What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.

To those of you who are wearing ties, I think my dad would appreciate it if you took them off.

My training as an engineer has enabled me to design the stuff, but the reason I do it is not to make music but for the opportunity to work with musicians.

I was never worried that synthesizers would replace musicians. First of all, you have to be a musician in order to make music with a synthesizer.

When a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.

I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers... They use my tools.

I happen to think that computers are the most important thing to happen to musicians since the invention of cat-gut which was a long time ago.

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.

One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music.

Back in the '40s and early '50s, building simple electronic projects was a popular hobby of many people. Back then, you could buy, you know, a few parts and - with tubes and build something on your kitchen table, and it would actually work.

By the time I got to building synthesizers, I had perhaps 20 years' experience building electronic musical instruments.

Everything has some consciousness, and we tap into that. It is about energy at its most basic level.

I had been building electronic musical instruments since I was a kid.

I'm finishing building a house and setting up a shop to build custom electronical musical instruments.

Leon Theremin's original designs are elegant, ingenious and effective. As electronics goes, the theremin is very simple. But there are so many subtleties hidden in the details of the design. It's like a great sonnet, or a painting, or a speech, that is perfectly done on more than one level.

My transition from scientist to entrepreneur? Some would say that I still haven't made that transition.

Other kids went out and beat each other up or played baseball, and I built electronics.

The mini-Moog was conceived originally as a session musician's axe, something a guy could carry to the studio, do a gig and walk out.

The point is that I don't design stuff for myself. I'm a toolmaker. I design things that other people want to use.

There are confirmed stories of people who can break instruments and cause them to fail by walking in a room. I'm the opposite - I can walk into a room and something will work better than it is supposed to.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

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

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

America can well expect to develop a goodly amount of composers for she has a goodly number of people.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.

The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

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.

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Composers are not all good conductors.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.

We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.