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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

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.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

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.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

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.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen Quote

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