Art & Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen is quietly picking a fight with the way classical music gets marketed: as a museum divided into warring rooms labeled Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern. By saying “roughly 300 years’ worth,” he frames the repertoire as a single living continuum, not a set of fenced-off styles that require different etiquette, different audiences, different emotional permissions. It’s a conductor’s argument disguised as a shrug.

The line works because it’s both practical and polemical. Practically, performers live in the connective tissue: tempo choices, articulation, balance, how a hall responds, how an orchestra breathes. Those decisions don’t reset at 1800 or 1910. Polemically, he’s resisting the genre tribalism that treats new music as medicine and old music as comfort food. If “there really are more similarities than differences,” then programming Sibelius next to Ligeti isn’t a provocation; it’s honest reporting.

The subtext is also about listening literacy. Salonen is betting that audiences can hear continuity in structure, tension-and-release, orchestral color, even in the basic problem every composer wrestles with: how to make time feel meaningful. That undercuts the fear-based narrative that contemporary music is “too hard,” while also puncturing the romantic fantasy that earlier music is somehow simpler or purer.

Context matters: Salonen has long championed modern and living composers while holding major podiums in the traditional canon. This sentence is his permission slip to treat the whole tradition as one conversation, not a timeline of revolutions.