What's your favorite meal?
The freshest possible salmon steaks from the peak of the salmon run in the northwest, steamed for about two minutes in sake infused with ginger, lemongrass and orange peel.

What's your idea of a perfect day?
A competitive softball game with friends, a good long bike ride, a nice nap, a great concert with at least one piece of music I've never heard before and good conversation afterward. And if we can work that salmon in, all the better.

What's your favorite place in the world?
A few years ago, I spent two weeks retreating from civilization by driving around Scotland. I ended up on a rocky point, leaning into a 50-knot gale blowing in off the North Sea, with nothing but ocean between me and the northern icecap. It had a bleak beauty to it; and it scared me, in some primordial way. I ran back toward civilization. But I'd like to work up the existential courage to go back sometime.

What kind of pets do you have?
People say you're either a dog person or a cat person - I'm both. But living in a city apartment with a guy who's at work all day would be unfair to a dog. So I've got a jet-black 10 year-old cat named Persephone. Just the right mix of friendly and haughty.

If you could invite four people to dinner (living and dead, famous and almost famous) who would they be and what would you serve?
It would have to be dinner and a jam session. Mozart, Clara Schumann, Stravinsky, and Donald MacLeod, the greatest player of the Highland bagpipes of the last century. And by now, we know they'd be having that salmon, don't we?

What's one of your favorite words?
I have two favorite words: Borborygmus and eponymous. It has nothing to do with what they mean, I just like the way they sound.

What's your greatest accomplishment (so far)?
The rare occasion when I say just the right thing in just the right way to open someone's ears to a revelatory experience with a piece of music.

What is your favorite song or other piece of music?
The String Quartet by Maurice Ravel. Why, oh why, did he only write one?

Name a (or THE) defining moment in your life.
At age 30 (ten years ago), moving from a comfortable, secure, sheltered life in Corvallis, Oregon to New York City. I didn't know anyone there. I had no contacts there. I had no job waiting for me. I just found a way to make it work; that, or jumping out of an airplane for the first time. Actually, I guess they were pretty similar.

 
This feature first appeared in the Scoop newsletter, which is published twice a month by NPR Communications.