I enjoy reading and thinking, and it's hard to make that space as an artist.
It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.
A concert is my experimentation time. I practice playing something several different ways, but in a concert, inevitably I get more ideas onstage, in that combination of focus and adrenaline, than I could ever get in the practice room.
Sometimes I like practicing, sometimes I don't. But I like the result... I hardly ever get discouraged. Maybe right when it's very hard to get something done correctly, but then the idea flashes through of how to fix it. And I get encouraged. And other ideas flow.
By the time I was 12, I was starting my high school stuff in home schooling.
There's this feeling of creativity in Iceland.
As a professional, you pick up ideas from your colleagues and the orchestras you work with, while coming up with mutual interpretations in very short periods of time.
Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.
In music you can find your own niche. You can do what you want to do. There is really no job description. You have to find your own way, and that's fun.
When you have live music in the background, people are usually talking over it. You don't actually get to listen to live music in your space all the time.
With a Grammy, if you're releasing your record with a major label, you have a chance with any record. You also have a very long shot with every record.
As a young performer, what you need to be doing is building your technique and musicality, not promoting your abilities - unless you're ready to take on all that will result from such an approach.
One challenge, if you do a website, a Youtube channel, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Ping, other things like that, is you don't have time to be an artist. As a performer, you need to practice.
Is there such a thing as a normal childhood?
Growing up as a classical musician, you're taught a lot about outreach and about how people aren't being taught music in school. But you don't have to study music to like it. And a lot of the music that people like - be it jazz or rock or opera - is stuff they haven't studied.
When we talk about music, we tend to place our experiences into one of two categories: making the music and listening to it. Delineating the two seems practical and obvious. In reality, though, there are a lot of opportunities for overlap, and it doesn't matter how you get into the music as long as you connect with it.
When you have a teacher who is part of a tradition, the other people in that tradition are such stars. You just look at them like pop stars.
I try to prioritize a certain amount of quiet work every day.
It's easy to be a prodigy. It's really hard to keep pushing in new directions.
I never felt like a prodigy. For one thing, the root of the word is rather monstrous, literally. I never really felt like a monster or anything abnormal, because I always had a lot of different interests. But kids tend to focus on one thing, and for me it was violin.