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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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Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Would
Think
Thinking
Like
Composing
Describe
Slow
Word

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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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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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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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Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
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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 love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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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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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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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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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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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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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
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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.
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In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
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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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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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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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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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My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
Esa-Pekka Salonen