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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

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Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Fluke
Flukes
Conducting
Happened
Something

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
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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.
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.
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
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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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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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.
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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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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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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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 love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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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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.
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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My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
Esa-Pekka Salonen