Best 68 quotes of Esa-pekka Salonen on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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