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"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."
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"When can you understand that the music you play is very good? It is when people look at you but see no one, no one but the music!"

"As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music."

"To understand fully the importance of music, you must try to image a world without music! Such a world would be a world of hopelessness and boredom!"

"As I fingered my way through the songs, I felt my worries slough away. My music has always been the best remedy for my dark moods. As I sang, even my bruises seemed to pain me less."

"So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls "a feeble fighter"."
Explore more quotes by Esa-Pekka Salonen

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been."

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