Quote

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.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Artist
Today
Masterpieces
Thing
Masterpiece
Immortal
Decide
Whenever
Creating
Works

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Image
Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, slow would be the word.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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?
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
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