Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

The old ideal Salonen is poking at is invisibility: the performance (and the piece itself) should feel so inevitable that you forget it was made. “If the seams are showing” doesn’t just mean sloppy craft; it’s a whole aesthetic theology where the audience isn’t supposed to notice joints, edits, or effort. In classical music, that translates to legato phrasing, blended timbres, and interpretations that hide the scaffolding of technique. The “seam” is the moment you hear the gear change: the splice between sections, the musician counting, the composer’s hand waving at you.

Salonen’s twist is to frame that ideal as historically contingent, not natural. Modern eyes are trained by montage: film cuts, TikTok jump edits, music production comping, even sports highlights. We live inside discontinuity that’s been made pleasurable. The subtext is a quiet indictment of concert-hall conservatism: an art form still policing “smoothness” while the rest of culture has normalized, even fetishized, the visible edit.

He’s also smuggling in a challenge to both composers and performers. If montage is our baseline, then “seams” aren’t necessarily failures; they can be the point. Think Stravinsky’s hard blocks, hip-hop sampling, or contemporary scores that flaunt their mechanics. Salonen isn’t romanticizing fragmentation so much as admitting a mismatch between how classical institutions want us to listen (as if continuity equals truth) and how contemporary life has taught us to perceive (as if the cut is honest). The provocation lands because it doesn’t attack tradition head-on; it simply reveals its hidden rulebook.