“I’ve been very fortunate as a composer to be involved with projects that have really propelled my scores forward. I’m very proud of it.”

Everything else is relative levels of hell.

The best parts about writing a show are [its] first, second and 10th anniversaries.

If you write enough musicals you pretty much have a sense of where they should go.

Having a tradition is a great thing to work within, and maybe today [it] is the only way to really land musically dramatic work.

And all these people really wanted to reinvigorate the animated musical, so they came to Howard Ashman and me. That was my entry into Disney.

And, it’s also about spurring each other on to doing really great, hard work.

So you have to do a lot of things in order for things to move forward.

So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.

Whether it’s animated, whether it’s live-action, whether it’s Broadway, whether it’s television, a musical is a musical is a musical.

I don’t write songs for myself anymore. I only write songs on assignment.

What brought me to Disney was the new regime, which is now the old regime, came over with Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, Jeffrey Katzenberg.

I’ve always juggled a lot of projects because at least half the projects you do get shelved.

It’s purely a business, but it is still so important to me emotionally.

So, pretty much you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.

Collaboration is being open to each other’s ideas and benefiting from each other’s perspectives in an open way.

Collaboration is all about rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and helping each other to constantly improve a piece.

Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro.

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression.

The model of a composer.

I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

I have written six symphonies, they are smaller-scale works. I seem to emit my themes, work them out, combine and intertwine them, and then come to a close. I usually feel that there are no superfluous extras, but probably most composers feel that way about their works.

The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.