Esa-Pekka Salonen's Quotes

When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.

With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

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.

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.

If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.

The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music.

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.

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.

The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.

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.

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.

This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.

I'm still disturbed if a chord isn't together, but your priorities change as you get older.

In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.

After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.

Anyone who composes and conducts at the same time is immediately suspect, because he must be faking one or the other.

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.

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

I always had, deep down, a slight aversion toward the purely cerebral in music.

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.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.