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

Esa-Pekka Salonen

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Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Hadn
Wouldn
Sound
Experience
Doe
Music
Way
Conducting

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, slow would be the word.
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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
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The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.
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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
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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.
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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
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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.
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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.
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The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.
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Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
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