Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotations

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.

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.

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

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.

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

Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.

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

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

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

The Northern idea of form is more of a process. The various units of the form overlap. You can't tell where some things stop and new things start. This is typical of Sibelius.

There is more openness in LA to possibilities than on the East Coast of America. There is a pioneering spirit there that stems from the reason people went out there in the first place-to find something new.

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.

Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.

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

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

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

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

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

Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.

If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.

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.

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.

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

Our industry [classic music] has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.

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.

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.

Lots of really interesting people move to U.S and decide to work here, because of this whole attitude and openness. I'm absolutely convinced that this is just the beginning. In a couple decades we will see an even more dramatic change.

Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

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.

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.

Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.

If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.

Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.

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

We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.

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.

It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.

If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.

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

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."

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'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.

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

I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.

Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.

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

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.

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.

After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.

The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.

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.

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.

I went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.

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.

Orphei Drängar possesses a combination of power, energy, and culture. Joy of discovery combined with professional technical and musical prowess.

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?

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.

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.

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

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?

Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed.

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

Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it's actually exhausting.

You know, in some ways conducting is counter-intuitive. It's like winter driving in Finland - if you skid, the natural reaction is to fight with the wheel and jam on the brakes, which is the quickest way to get killed. What you have to do is let go, and the car will right itself. It's the same when an orchestra loses its ensemble. You have to resist the temptation to semaphore, and let the orchestra find its own way back to the pulse.

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.