Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

A conductor doesn’t complain about “precision and clarity” because he hates clean playing; he does it because he hears what that obsession has quietly pushed out of the room. Salonen is pointing at a modern orchestral norm: the idea that the ideal performance is one where every instrumental “layer” is audibly quarantined, every line sterilized into its own perfectly lit display case. It’s a compliment with a wince.

The phrasing matters. “Have become used to” suggests conditioning, not progress - a professional habit formed by auditions, recordings, and rehearsal economics. When an orchestra lives under microphones and competition juries, separation reads as competence. You can hear the inner voices. You can grade the results. You can sell the product. Salonen’s subtext is that what’s measurable starts to masquerade as what’s musical.

“Emphasis on the separation of layers” also smuggles in a worldview: music as an engineered object, assembled from discrete components. That’s a very late-20th/early-21st century way of listening, trained by studio culture and digital editing. The danger isn’t just coldness; it’s a loss of blend as a moral and aesthetic value - the old orchestral magic where timbres fuse, edges blur, and the sound becomes bigger than its parts.

In context, Salonen has long championed modern repertoire and high-definition execution, so this isn’t nostalgia. It’s a warning from inside the machine: when “ultimate” precision becomes the default goal, risk, breath, and narrative rub start to feel like mistakes instead of meaning.