Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

38 quotes in 496 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
• I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.
• 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.
• 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…
• I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
• I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
• I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
• I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
• Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.
• 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…
• Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
• 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…
• Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.
• After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
• In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
• Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
• 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…

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