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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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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
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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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I actually don't like this term, classic. It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.
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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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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 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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Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
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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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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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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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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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I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
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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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After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
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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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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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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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Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
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