After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

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

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

I love a visceral sound, the kind that hits you in the belly.
Esa-Pekka Salonen


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

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

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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

In the range of music that we play - roughly 300 years' worth-there really are more similarities than differences.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

Los Angeles is just a more open place. The way L.A. functions is that people give you a forum. They say, Show us what you can do.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.
Esa-Pekka Salonen

Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.
Esa-Pekka Salonen