Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Pulse is the unsung force that turns music from a beautifully arranged object into a living argument, and Esa-Pekka Salonen is pointing straight at the composers who treat rhythm not as background plumbing but as front-page rhetoric. By calling pulse an "active means of expression", he’s pushing back on the polite idea that emotion in classical music mainly rides on melody and harmony. For Salonen, pulse is agency: it insists, provokes, organizes attention, even when the notes themselves seem familiar.

Pairing Stravinsky with Beethoven is a deliberately cheeky leap across eras, and it reveals Salonen’s priorities as a conductor-composer steeped in modernism. Stravinsky is the obvious poster child: the mechanized snap of The Rite of Spring, the brittle elegance of neoclassicism, rhythm as shock tactic and architecture. The subtler flex is Beethoven, who’s often sold as the patron saint of theme and heroic development. Salonen hears something closer to kinetic obsession: the relentless engine of the Seventh Symphony, the hammering inevitability of the Fifth, the way repetition becomes drama rather than redundancy. Beethoven doesn’t just move forward; he compels forward motion.

The subtext is aesthetic and political in the small-p sense: take rhythm seriously and you change the whole hierarchy of what "expressive" means. It also hints at Salonen’s own lineage: a 20th/21st-century musician who reads Beethoven less as marble monument and more as radical time-shaper. Pulse, here, is the proof that classical music isn’t about tasteful feelings; it’s about control of time and the listener’s body.