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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
Way
Conducting
Hadn
Wouldn
Sound
Experience
Doe
Music

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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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 love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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I actually don't like this term, classic. It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.
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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.
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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 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.
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I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
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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.
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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
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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 think we are in the process of getting the word out, and we haven't done very well yet. But we are trying.
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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
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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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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.
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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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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.
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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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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen