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"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."
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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 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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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