Creativity Quote by Esa-Pekka Salonen

Salonen is talking like a composer who’s tired of musical architecture that feels bolted together. “Continuity of sound and form” isn’t a bland aesthetic preference; it’s a quiet manifesto against the obvious seams we’re trained to hear: the big cadence, the clear-cut movement break, the “now we’re in the development section” signposting. The intent is practical and sensuous at once: make form behave like sound behaves in real time, so structure isn’t an external blueprint imposed on the music but something the ear can physically follow.

Invoking Ligeti matters because Ligeti’s music is famously obsessed with transformation that’s almost geological: textures that shift, thicken, evaporate, mutate. When Salonen says Ligeti “was always going on,” you can hear the studio intimacy in it, the mentor’s stubborn refrain. Subtext: this wasn’t optional advice; it was a value system, maybe even a corrective to a certain conservatory neatness. Ligeti’s continuity is also a kind of mistrust of cheap drama. Instead of contrast as a jump cut, you get contrast as metamorphosis.

Contextually, Salonen sits at the crossroads of late modernism and a postmodern audience that wants immediacy. His way through is to make complexity feel inevitable. “Form has to be continuous” becomes a listener-first ethic: if the ear never loses the thread, the intellect can come along without the music turning into a lecture.