Time & Perspective Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen’s jab lands because it sounds like a tidy rule of artistic physics: your hands can’t serve two masters, so one of them must be lying. Coming from a conductor-composer who’s done both at the highest level, the line reads less like jealousy than like a deliberately sharpened warning about performance culture. It’s not that composing and conducting are incompatible; it’s that the modern classical world loves a multi-hyphenate brand, and branding can quietly replace craft.

The specific intent is to puncture the prestige of the “total musician” myth. In the orchestra pit, authority is tactile and immediate: cueing, balancing, listening, managing human nerves in real time. In composition, authority is slow-burn and solitary: building a logic that survives without your body in front of it. Salonen implies that doing both at once invites a kind of theatrical shortcut, where conducting becomes pantomime (big gestures standing in for deep rehearsal) or composing becomes a vanity vehicle (music optimized to flatter the podium personality).

The subtext is also about suspicion as a professional instinct. Orchestras are trained to detect bluffing; audiences aren’t. So the “suspect” figure is the one who benefits most from visibility: the maestro who can sell tickets as a creator-genius while outsourcing rigor to musicians and marketing.

Context matters: Salonen emerged in an era when classical institutions, anxious about relevance, started rewarding crossover narratives. His line is a sly defense of specialization not as elitism, but as honesty: pick the job you’re actually doing, and do it without the costume of the other.