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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

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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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The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.
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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 love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
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Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.
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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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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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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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We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
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