Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes
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I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
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I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.
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With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.
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There is such a suspicion in today's world of people who do more than one thing, who aren't specialized.
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I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.
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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.
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Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.
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I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.
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Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.
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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 Northern idea of form is more of a process. The various units of the form overlap. You can't tell where some things stop and new things start. This is typical of Sibelius.
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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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Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.
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Our industry classic music has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.
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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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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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Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
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I can't imagine how many first performances I've done, perhaps 500. Some of them have been very good, and some of course very bad.
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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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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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The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.
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The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.
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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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I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds.