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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
Composing
Describe
Slow
Word
Would
Think
Thinking
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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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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 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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Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
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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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Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
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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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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
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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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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
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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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I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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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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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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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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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 Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
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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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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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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
Esa-Pekka Salonen