Politics & Power Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen’s line reads like a composer explaining why one city feels like a major key and another like a tight, inherited minor. He’s not romanticizing palm trees; he’s describing a social acoustics. Los Angeles, in his telling, has a looser grip on pedigree. The East Coast stands in for institutions that prize continuity: conservatories, legacy orchestras, donor cultures, a sense that “seriousness” is guarded by gatekeepers with long memories. LA, by contrast, is framed as a place where reinvention isn’t a character flaw. It’s the local dialect.

The intent is partly pragmatic. Salonen spent pivotal years reshaping the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and this is an argument for why that experiment could happen there: audiences willing to try unfamiliar repertoire, a cultural ecosystem built from arrivals, and a city whose prestige economy is less tied to old-world validation. “Openness to possibilities” is also a gentle rebuke to coastal snobberies that treat newness as suspect. He’s suggesting that creativity needs risk the way music needs silence: space where outcomes aren’t pre-decided.

The subtext is about migration as an aesthetic engine. People didn’t go west because it was easy; they went because the old scripts didn’t fit. Salonen borrows that founding myth to justify artistic boldness now, aligning contemporary programming and cross-genre collaboration with frontier logic. It’s civic boosterism, sure, but it’s also a musician’s diagnosis: innovation flourishes where identity is less settled, where the next version of yourself is allowed to exist before it’s fully explained.