106 Quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

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.

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.

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

There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.

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

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.

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

The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.

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.