Art & Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Europe’s cultural superpower is also its dead weight: a museum-grade reverence that can quietly turn living art into a reenactment. When Esa-Pekka Salonen points to “so much tradition” and “established ideas,” he’s not admiring the furniture; he’s noticing how often the room dictates the conversation. In classical music especially, Europe’s prestige economy runs on inherited authority: canonical composers, storied halls, “correct” interpretations, and a conservatory pipeline that rewards fidelity over risk. Tradition becomes less a lineage you extend than a standard you comply with.

The phrasing “what it should be” matters. Salonen is calling out a moralizing aesthetic, where taste gets framed as obligation. “What it has always been” is the sharper barb: the past isn’t simply remembered, it’s enforced, used as evidence that the future should look the same. That’s how gatekeeping learns to sound like stewardship. The subtext is institutional: funding bodies, critics, boards, and audiences often prefer the comfort of continuity, and European cultural infrastructure is built to preserve masterpieces, not necessarily to midwife new ones.

Salonen’s own career makes the critique land. He’s a conductor-composer who has championed contemporary work while operating inside the most tradition-heavy machinery on the planet. Read in that light, this line is less anti-European than pro-aliveness. He’s arguing for art as an evolving practice, not a heritage site. The irony is that Europe’s tradition was once radical; the tragedy is forgetting that and treating innovation as an import rather than a birthright.