Art & Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen’s line is a polite refusal with teeth: he’s not rejecting film music, he’s rejecting the institutional habit of treating it like a seasonal obligation. The target isn’t John Williams or Ennio Morricone; it’s the programming logic that turns “film night” into a predictable brand extension, a safe-ticket event dressed up as outreach. “Annual dose” makes it sound medicinal, even patronizing, as if audiences need their accessible concert once a year to be kept compliant. He’s calling out the way orchestras sometimes use film scores as a cultural loophole: mass appeal without the risk of challenging repertoire.

The subtext is also about hierarchy. Film music has long lived in a contested space between craft and “serious” art, and Salonen knows the conversation tends to get stuck there. His move is to shift the criterion from category to necessity. Not “Is film music worthy?” but “Why this piece, now, here?” That’s a curatorial argument, not a snob’s dismissal.

Context matters: Salonen is both an elite conductor-composer and a modernist tastemaker who’s spent decades pushing institutions to justify themselves. In an era when orchestras are urged to broaden audiences, he’s insisting that relevance can’t be outsourced to a genre label. If film music enters the hall, it should arrive as repertoire, not as merchandise - programmed with the same rigor, risk, and conviction as anything else.