Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Call it the highest compliment a composer can get: inevitability. When Esa-Pekka Salonen says Stravinsky's harmony is "so precisely" conceived that it "can only be the way it is", he's praising a kind of musical engineering where every chord feels less like a choice and more like a physical law. The line pushes back against the lazy idea that modernist harmony is random, ugly, or merely provocative. Salonen is insisting that Stravinsky's dissonances are not decorative grit; they're structural.

The subtext is also a defense of craft in an era that often romanticizes inspiration. "Masterly" here doesn't mean grand or emotional in the traditional sense. It means controlled: Stravinsky's harmonic language is built with such clarity of purpose that alternatives collapse on contact. You can hear that in works like The Rite of Spring or Symphonies of Wind Instruments, where harmonies behave like blocks of sound - stacked, rotated, re-lit - not like late-Romantic progressions yearning toward resolution. The effect is famously bracing, even impersonal, yet the precision makes it persuasive. Your ear may resist, but it can't argue.

Context matters: Salonen isn't just an admirer; he's a conductor-composer steeped in 20th-century repertoire, speaking from inside the machinery. This is an insider's diagnosis of why Stravinsky endures: not because he shocked the audience once, but because the notes feel unavoidable.