Top 60 Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I like this idea of identification with the local team. I think it’s great. That’s what an orchestra should be. It’s an orchestra for its hometown, and it serves the people.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

2. “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

3. “The classical music industry, has been an industry of covers. So we do covers, and if I compare this with the rock and pop side, what is the most exciting event?”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

4. “Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

5. “Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

8. “Once you get over the first hill, there is always a new, higher one lurking, of course.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

9. “I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, “slow” would be the word.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

10. “I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

11. “The Royal Festival Hall in London is nice; people hang out there. I think this inviting, non-exclusive character is very important.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “This country, and the West Coast, especially, is bad at preserving any cultural legacy.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

17. “Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

18. “Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

19. “If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

20. “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

21. “Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

22. “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.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

23. “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

24. “If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

25. “The philharmonic became such a journey and adventure in my life, and a deeply satisfying thing.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

26. “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

27. “I’ve learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

28. “I feel that this is my artistic home, and I’m very happy to be a California artist together with many others who are not from here originally but who decided to make this the center of their activities. There’s something about that that I find very inspiring and satisfying.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

29. “I started conducting lessons and I realized that this is actually something I like doing.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

30. “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

31. “I went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

32. “After 30 years I have realized the greatest pleasure I can get is to have learnt.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

33. “This conducting thing happened. In 1983 I was sucked into this international career, which was a very scary experience.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

34. “There is such a suspicion in today’s world of people who do more than one thing, who aren’t specialized.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

35. “Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it’s actually exhausting.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

36. “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.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

37. “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

38. “If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

39. “When an artist works today or whenever, it’s not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that’s the one thing we don’t decide ourselves.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

44. “Of course performing talent, that’s clear. Maybe this is not so well-known among young people who are interested in music, who are talented in music, but they’re trying to figure out how to go about it.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

45. “Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

46. “Conducting was just something that happened by fluke.”

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

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

— Esa-Pekka Salonen