What kind of music were you raised on?

I grew up in a small town in Sweden, and my family had no special interest in music. My mom's record collection consisted of lots of Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder records, so I very quickly learned to despise anything with a harmonica or electric piano in it. My dad only listened to sandy-voiced country western singers. Dolly Parton was the only one without a vocal cord disorder among them.

And what about your own early musical tastes?

My own record collection was made up of soundtracks, Norwegian schlager, and anything by Eurythmics. I made an Annie Lennox altar under my desk, which sat next to my collection of home-made bonsai trees. The first vinyl single I ever bought was "Cannelloni Macaroni" — a Swedish pop tune about this guy who is obsessed with Italian cuisine. It lists every thinkable Italian dish. Brilliant song. Lasse Holm was the singer. I also had a crush on Gene Simmons because of his the tongue. And I had a thing for Meatloaf at one point. There was something about this gothy, ugly duckling guy with the big rock opera ambitions that spoke to me. I think he fit into my twisted fascination with vampires and outcast people.

So how on earth did you end up turning to classical music?

My first "classical" composer was Michael Nyman. He's the Basement Jaxx of classical. Very fun and up-tempo. Simplistic, but very effective. I didn't start listening actively to classical music until I was 19, and I see that as an asset rather than a problem. I'm not telling kids to stay away from classical music if they one day want to become composers, but having come late to the game, I love that I have so much music left to explore. I mean, I still can't hum the theme of Beethoven's 2nd. I've got most of the other down by now, but that one still escapes me, so I keep chasing it. My worst nightmare would be to one day finish listening to a piece of classical music and go "Done! That's all of them."

What led you from being a listener to playing and composing?

I moved to Stockholm from the countryside when I was 18. At 20, I was almost two years into law school and dreading every minute of it. In the mock courtroom classes I always played the drunk witness, since that part actually benefited from a lack of formal legal knowledge. I worked in a wine store on the side to make money to afford lessons from this wonderfully stylish Latvian concert pianist, Guna Kurmis ("One glass of wine for lunch isn't going to hurt anyone"). She was just wonderful, always in furs and scarves and a very elaborate hairdo. After two years of piano lessons, I secretly quit law school. Phone conversations with my parents got very tricky at that point. I told them that I was on my way to exams when I was really at home by the piano, recording myself on this tiny portable cassette tape recorder, repeating one or two chords for hours, since I honestly had no idea how to turn them into anything that lasted past 20 seconds. My one ally in this, my great friend Pernilla, called me up every afternoon to ask about my supposed progress, and I always put the receiver inside the piano and played her the thumpy chords of the day, and she would give very useful critique. Then I'd go take the daily nap on my windowsill (5th floor overlooking the stunning Hogalid Park where my grandmother is buried). A year later I was able to tell my parents that I was now a starving musician with a career in alcohol retail as a backup. They were not amused. They came around eventually.

So how would you characterize the differences between pop and classical music?

The biggest difference is the audience, unfortunately. However, most good pop music is obviously built on classical principles, but with a kind of limited palette and scope. That said, it makes me annoyed when "classical" people proudly announce that they don't ever listen to pop. It's like saying that you never watch television, expecting people to admire you for that. You never hear a French chef saying "I never tried Greek cuisine". It's an artist's duty to sift through influences. Pop music and classical music share a language, but pop is like a short story while classical music is a poem. Both require specific skills that are hard to acquire. Classical music is usually conceived without the restriction of needing to be immediately gratifying. In fact, it should have a long shelf life to be considered successful. As a listener you may have to sit your ass down and actually listen, and then slowly, layer upon layer will reveal itself. It may take a week or a month. If it takes longer, it's usually not worth it. Mozart takes an elevator ride.

What pop are you enjoying lately?

I like the ambitious and quirky productions of Sufjan Stevens. His voice annoys me if I listen to too many tracks in a row, but how can I resist layers upon layers of recorders? Bjork seems to have earned a very practical level of popularity. She can do pretty much whatever she wants at this point, and while she keeps it pretty safe, I like a lot of what she does. I love her Homogenic and Medulla albums. I hate Vespertine though. Fiona Apple and Jon Brion make excellent tracks together. Regina Spektor is pretty good, Air sometimes succeeds. Erlend Øye is cute. I like some songs on PJ Harvey's new CD. These artists all have in common that they have claimed their own sonic territory, like Aphex Twin, Portishead and those people did a decade ago. That's what a pop artist should aim for. Originality. They're never going to amaze me with their harmonic schemes or something like that, that's what Schoenberg is for. It's production, the originality and the lyrics that will do it for me in pop music.

I know you've taken a real shine to living in New York since moving here for graduate school in 2000. What's the main appeal for you?

I like the idea that I can't know everything that's going on in it, and that I can never fully figure this place out. Why is that woman combing her leg hair on the subway? How is it that in one of the most modern cities in the world, people still use checks? Why do old people in Queens look like birds? Why is the majority still Republican? (Someone needs to teach all those drag queens to vote). But mostly, I love that anything could be around the next corner, artistically and otherwise. And there's a very active new music scene here, run more on stubbornness than on money. Bartok starved to death in New York, so its good enough for me.

What do you miss about Sweden?

I miss the feeling that it would take a lot of hard work to truly screw your life up. In New York, The Final Screw-Up is almost life's default direction that you have to steer clear of. It's damn hard to get fired in Sweden, for instance. You'd have to run and hide to be left alone to starve to death if such were your inclination. If you go broke, I have a feeling the Swedish banks would put a little pocket money in your account. If you lose your job, the government will pay you to re-educate yourself to some other profession and provide you with an apartment and a maid in the meantime. That's the socialist ghost for you. I sometimes miss that. On the other hand, that kind of living stifles creativity. It stops the itch.I also miss never having religion be an issue. I still can't get over that most people in America believe in god. It's so quaint, and so destructive. It makes me drop a lot of conversations. As soon as someone "has faith", I stop trusting them.

And I miss Swedish cheese. Totally different from Swiss. It's the best.

What's your composing process like? How do you get from a kernel of an idea to a full piece?

I'm rarely inspired by, say, nature or a poem that stayed with me since childhood or the usual crap that composers are supposed to be governed by. Composing really is a craft, and as a composer you should be able to take a rather mediocre kernel and polish it until it sparkles. I get my inspiration from a kind of samaritan instinct. I want to rescue that kernel from mediocrity. In fact, I should start to refer to myself, in third person, as The Jesus Christ of Music. I first produce a lot of those kernels, then randomly start to polish them, making sure not to pre-determine anything about the piece. The trick is not to get bored, to keep the mystery alive even to myself until the very end. I keep only the very best kernels (I hand the rest down to my students as homework) and turn them into little sections. Then I look for a logical order for the sections that I create and I start to build bridges. The rest is hours upon hours of fixes, literally. The fixing is my favorite part. That's when I start to truly see the piece. I couldn't work any other way. It needs to be a journey of discovery rather than a realization of a finished thought. I tried the latter, and I couldn't bear to merely realize something that I had already finished conceptually in my head.

Is composing film scores different than composing performance pieces?

This is actually harder to explain, because it's very intuitive for me. In a forthcoming film that I'm scoring right now — Dolores, The Tattoo Lady, by Christopher Young — I had to score this seedy sexual abuse scene, and I could have used thick, horrifying, dissonant sounds; but I find it much more interesting to challenge that instinct and make the audience take musical notice. I orchestrated a stunning Chopin nocturne to go with it instead, giving it a rich, operatic feel. The result is that the scene feels sexy and elegant, which of course is itchingly inappropriate. The music thereby kind of abuses the visuals, which will hopefully make the audience cringe in just the right way. Instead of just musically retelling a horrible moment, I tried to musically recreate the act itself.

And what about your work in electronic music?

The writer and musician Rob Stephenson and I have been working on experimental sound composition for over three years now. Through thousands of hours of abuse and strategic misuse of software, instruments and people, we've finally arrived at a work we've titled dog. It is an album length collection of about a dozen tracks that ranges from tongue-in-cheek takes on the compact harmonies of jazz legend Hermeto Pascoal to Schoenbergian niblets for cello against monumental sample drones and whispers. Schoenberg was good at getting the kernels just right, so we stole some and hacked them into serialist sprinkles. How no one did this before us is beyond me. The CD will be ready for release in 2006. We're trying not to release it at the same time as Beyonce's, since we're obviously fighting for the same audience.

I know that as a composer and academic, you don't lead a very extravagant lifestyle. So how do you explain your ever-changing hair?

My stylist, Krister Atle, is also an artist. He's a part of Sweden that I love having in New York. I think I've done about five different hair colors and dos over the last two years. I never ask for them. He puts them in, and I accept them - sometimes reluctantly, but usually ecstatically. Lately he's been putting in extensions (the Indian temple girl stuff), so that I actually end up leaving his place with longer hair than I came with. He keeps referring to it as "virgin hair", which feels very pagan and saucy.

Anything else you'd like to cover before we finish up?

Did you know that glass is a liquid? That makes a glass of water a liquid contained in another liquid. I want a third liquid to put the glass in, to make it a Russian doll thing with liquids.