Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Perfectionism doesn’t retire; it just gets demoted. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s line catches that peculiar aging musician’s dilemma: the ear stays ruthless even as the psyche learns to ration its outrage. “Disturbed” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s not mild annoyance; it’s the bodily jolt of hearing a chord that doesn’t lock, the conductor’s reflexive sense that a collective has failed to become a single instrument. For someone trained to chase unanimity in real time, intonation and togetherness aren’t aesthetic preferences so much as moral weather.

Then comes the pivot: “but your priorities change.” Salonen isn’t recanting standards; he’s describing the recalibration that arrives after enough concerts, enough rehearsal rooms, enough nights where the world refuses to cooperate. The subtext is that obsession with the microscopic can crowd out the macroscopic: narrative arc, emotional risk, the social ecology of an orchestra, even the simple fact that audiences rarely remember the one smeared chord but always remember whether the music meant something.

Context matters: Salonen belongs to a late-20th/21st-century conducting culture that prizes polish, efficiency, and studio-level exactitude, yet he’s also a composer and a modernist advocate, someone who needs musicians to play at the edge of certainty. His quote reads like a seasoned truce between control and life: you keep the inner critic because it’s part of the job, but you stop letting it run the whole show. Aging, here, isn’t compromise; it’s perspective with teeth.