Quote

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.

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
Always
Bites
Would
Composer
Life
Rather
Felt
Around
Conducts
Change
Bullet
Way
Bite
Make
Bullets

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
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
Image
Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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.
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
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
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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
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
Image
Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Image
I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
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
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?
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
I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
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
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
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
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
Image
I think we are in the process of getting the word out, and we haven't done very well yet. But we are trying.
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