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

- 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

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

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

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

- Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

- Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

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

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

- Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

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

- 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

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

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

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.

- Esa-Pekka Salonen

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.

- Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

- Esa-Pekka Salonen