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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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Esa-Pekka Salonen
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: June 30
Composer
Conductor
Helsingfors
Wrong
Actually
Moment
Moments
Better
Like
Classic
Term
Word

More quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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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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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Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
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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Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
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
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.
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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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.
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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In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
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