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I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

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Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Love
Visceral
Hits
Belly
Sound
Kind

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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
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I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, slow would be the word.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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?
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen