Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen’s line has the casual understatement of a working musician describing a private rewiring: one collaboration, and the canon tilts. The name-drop isn’t decorative. Ligeti stands for an ear trained on texture, micro-gesture, and the strange physics of sound in motion; Brahms and Beethoven stand for “structure,” the monuments we’re told to hear as inevitable. Salonen is pointing to how quickly inevitability collapses once your listening habits change.

The intent is quietly insurgent. He’s not demoting the classics; he’s refusing to let them remain sealed inside a museum-style narrative of greatness. Working with Ligeti means living inside a composer’s workshop where rhythm can behave like weather, where harmony is a field of pressures rather than a set of rules. Bring that sensibility back to Brahms and suddenly the famed solidity starts to look like a special effect: seams, sutures, engineered tensions. Beethoven’s propulsion reads less like heroic destiny and more like an audacious manipulation of time and expectation.

The subtext is also about authority. Orchestras and conservatories often train you to revere certain composers and “respect” certain sounds. Salonen is confessing that respect can be a kind of deafness. Ligeti’s modernism becomes a corrective lens, letting him hear the older music as newly risky, even weird, rather than safely “masterful.”

Context matters: Salonen is a conductor-composer who built a career programming contemporary work alongside the standard repertoire. The quote doubles as a manifesto for that practice: new music isn’t a side dish; it changes the main course.