Bryce Dessner

“The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.”

“As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.”

“When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.”

“David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love about New York, especially the stunning diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and communities.”

“A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I'm in a rock band. The truth is that it's the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.”

“Typically, people think, 'Oh the hippies and the punks hated each other,' or that those things don't go together musically. Sometimes that is true, but we had equal parts of both in our musical DNA.”

“My main professional experience is touring in a rock band.”

“Musicians are hungry for new music.”

“My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.”

“For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.”

“I can't just play in a rock band. The National is a great, exciting band to play in. We improvise a lot onstage, and it's very intense, but after a while, I crave other kinds of experiences.”

“I like to write on tour busses and airplanes. Something about moving.”

“David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.”

“I call The National my family, and I'll be doing that as long as I want to.”

“There is a kind of adventure- and risk-seeking audience in classical contemporary music that is really empowering and part of what draws me to it. The people that come to these concerts are open-minded and curious.”

“I studied classical guitar in school, and that type of stuff has led to writing for Kronos.”

“I grew up going to see my sister dance, both at the ballet and later as a modern dancer, and have always been a big fan of the ballet. So I have had a long relationship with dance.”

“You don't come to our shows if you want to look cool.”

“Being a classical musician, you can go to school for it; you can go get a degree. Even as a composer, there is a certain career path you can follow, but becoming a rock musician is a much more elusive career. How do you learn that or do that?”

“I've always been in rock bands. I was in a rock band with my brother in high school. Then I was playing classical guitar recitals, and people said, 'You know, you can't really do both things.' My intuition told me they were wrong. Somehow, what was interesting about me was that I had those two things in my life.”