“I always like to think I build in historically accurate musical in-jokes that are so precise that like maybe there’s 7 or 8 people in the world watching the show that will sit up and go, “Oh my God the music being played is the right kind of music!””

Tension, especially with regard to horror, is a very difficult thing to sustain in the big sense.

If I switch showrunners and I get to stay on the show, I approach it like it’s their show, and I’m here to write their music for them.

I think the thing that music can do is be unsettling. It is abnormal – music that’s perceived to be different in an unresolved or unusual way.

With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer.

The showrunner relationship in television is what the director relationship in film, there’s really no more important relationship.

I’m not a good enough musician to like completely master something in a couple of days and turn it around.

What I love more than anything is Jerry Goldsmith’s 80’s music and Bernard Herrmann’s genre music from the 50’s and 60’s.

I have been very fortunate in that I’m not doing all network shows or all cable shows, television has really become a year-round process in the way that it’s made.

While the accompanimental [sic] figures come from Prelude, the melody is wholly original to this theme. First stated on a lonely duduk, and then in octaves by the violins and violas, it is a melancholy and contemplative tune.

If I were doing five cop shows, I’d probably start struggling to find an identity for each one and struggling to find inspirations.

Sometimes I find bringing in my old ideas is just detrimental.

When you change showrunners, it’s like getting divorced and getting remarried.

I’ve always approached television from a little more cinematic perspective, if not a much more cinematic perspective because of the shows I have been fortunate enough to work on.

Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.

I made a bunch of comedies, I made one drama and I made a couple musicals.

A good analogy [Charlie Hebdo] in lots of ways is “South Park” – the hugely popular American cartoon show – and the things that the “South Park” creators have created, like “The Book Of Mormon,” the Broadway musical.

I come from a musical family as well as a culinary family.

When they saw you kneeling, crying words you mean. Opening their eyeballs, eyeballs, pretending that your Al Green, Al Green.

Until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all.

Yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life’s endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.