Esa-Pekka Salonen
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.
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 faster.
My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
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.
Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
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.
The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.
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.
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.
This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.
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.
Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
There is such a suspicion in today's world of people who do more than one thing, who aren't specialized.
With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.
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.
Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.
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 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.
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.
I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
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.
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.
This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.
I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.
The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.
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.
Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.
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.
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Letting Go
After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Ideas
Orphei Drängar possesses a combination of power, energy, and culture. Joy of discovery combined with professional technical and musical prowess.Collection: Discovery
The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.Collection: War
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?Collection: Rocks
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.Collection: Thinking
Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.Collection: Flukes