Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?

Of course performing talent, that's clear. Maybe this is not so well-known among young people who are interested in music, who are talented in music, but they're trying to figure out how to go about it.

This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.

The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.

The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.

I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

I think we are in the process of getting the word out, and we haven't done very well yet. But we are trying.

Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.

There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.

The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.

Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.

When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.

I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.

The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.

The classical music industry, has been an industry of covers. So we do covers, and if I compare this with the rock and pop side, what is the most exciting event?

The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.

Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.

I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

There is such a suspicion in today's world of people who do more than one thing, who aren't specialized.

I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

There was this kind of mildly annoying mythology about conductor Like biker should riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, and wearing a sort of a leather suit.

I realized that the European dogma is not necessarily the only way to look at things.

As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

If somebody had told me when I was starting composition in Helsinki in the '70s that I would end up in L.A. and to describe that journey, those 17 years with the philharmonic and building the hall and this and that, I would have said, "This is a fairy tale of the first order."

The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.

There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.

I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.

In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.

If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.

I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.

Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

We're dealing with music that is being played by traditional instruments in a specifically built building called a concert hall.
But classical is not - the reference is wrong, because classical on one hand refers to one period in musical history, which is Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven, which is a fine period in musical history, but it was a while ago.On the other hand, it sort of alludes to some kind of "class," which A, is not true; B, is kind of detrimental to the whole idea. Because the point is that this music is available and it's actually relatively reasonably priced.

I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.

I feel that this is my artistic home, and I'm very happy to be a California artist together with many others who are not from here originally but who decided to make this the center of their activities. There's something about that that I find very inspiring and satisfying.

I started conducting lessons and I realized that this is actually something I like doing.

I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.

When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.

I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.

I like this idea of identification with the local team. I think it's great. That's what an orchestra should be. It's an orchestra for its hometown, and it serves the people.

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

The players never think they project enough. In a hall that seats 3,300 people, it's a very scary thing to play so quietly that you can barely hear yourself.

We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.