usc lecture


I am speaking to you today at the age of 48. The mythic fifty-year mark is not far away: it already shows up quite clearly, because on my calendar there are entries well beyond the year 2008. I have been a professional musician, a performer and a composer for well over a quarter of a century. Yet it feels as if everything is just beginning. Long experience and hard work have not brought me very much closer to music’s essential mystery. Quite the opposite. As a young man what I thought of as being a river has turned out to be an ocean, the crossing of which is not accomplished in a single person’s lifetime. If I have learned anything, I have learned humility and deep reverence for the work of musicians greater than I. I am reasonably sure that the very greatest makers of this kind of art have had to admit to themselves that the open sea is boundless. Perhaps greatness manifests itself when you dare to look at the far horizon, even though you are threatened with dizziness.

Shortly before his death, Witold Lutosławski said that three simple rules had finally been invented that could be followed to write good music. I tried to keep my voice calm, perhaps even indifferent, when I asked what those rules were. Witold said it was too big a topic to explain just like that; let’s talk about it later, perhaps at dinner, he said. We never had time for that dinner. Steven Stucky (who is also one of the leading Lutosławski scholars of our time) surmises that those rules really exist and that Witold’s whole later production follows them quite faithfully. He believes that it is some kind of simple matrix that determines which notes follow which and what pitches will be superimposed on one another.

When I speak about the ocean, I mean just this: we can never govern music as a whole. Even a master like Lutosławski at the end of his life marked the limits of the prescription for good music in pitch. But what about rhythm? dynamics? timbre? form? In the mid-1980s I had a kind of aesthetic crisis, which was quite difficult to get through. Composition came only very slowly, and finally not at all. Superficially, of course, the reason was my conducting work, which, after my debut in London in 1983, required the greater part of my time, not to mention my energy. It was easy to plead that excuse when I tried to explain why I was not producing any compositions. Easier than to tell the truth, which was considerably more complicated and more painful. Also I understood the nature of the problem only after a long process. The solution to the problem also came gradually, not in a flash, even though I had an almost visionary moment of clarity early one morning in Los Angeles in the spring of 1996. I will return to that moment later.

Post-serial music, post-Darmstadt dogma, with its endless taboos, rules and prohibitions, began to seem absurd. In concerts around the world I was conducting music that I loved deeply and that affected me at every level, physically and psychologically: symphonies of Beethoven, Bruckner and Mahler; works of Debussy, Ravel, Sibelius, Strauss and Stravinsky. All those elements that made this music great and powerful were forbidden in the project of modernism: Beethoven and Stravinsky’s pulse and rhythmic drive; Bruckner’s modulations; Sibelius’s organic forms; Strauss’s orchestral resonance and brilliance. What was left in a composer’s toolbox if melody, harmony and pulse were taken away? Not very much.

I had to ask myself, did I really like Schönberg’s music of the Piano Suite, Op. 22 onward? No. The grayness and indifference of the harmony in a typical 12-tone piece is disturbing. (Schönberg’s Wind Quintet! What a dreadful piece!) Nor can I honestly say that I am enthusiastic about Webern’s late works, even though the post-war modernist generation took them as their point of departure in looking for new language and syntax.

One cannot create language. Language is like an organism that develops according to natural laws. Language is not a mechanism that can be put together like a watch or a motor. Esperanto is a language that is practically and splendidly constructed: there are no exceptions to its grammar; all possible sentences can be built completely logically based on plain and simple rules.

Yet, originally, I wrote this text in Finnish. People usually speak their own language, no matter how complicated and impractical it may be. (The nearly global success of English arises from the fact that of all languages, English has most effectively absorbed material from other tongues and other cultures, not because it is an especially easy or logical instrument of communication.)

In my view, there were two main reasons for the enormous (though short-lived) success of Darmstadt. The first is logical and widely known; the second is more obscure. We can well imagine the pain and collective trauma felt by a young generation of composers on trying to build a new Europe and a new European music on ruins that were still smoking. They had to invent a whole new music, because the previous culture and politics had led to world history’s greatest catastrophe. Although this really new music was completely incomprehensible, even loathsome to the greater part of society, there was a desire to support the attempt to construct such music and to understand it. In many other areas it was decided to create whole new structures and thought models, so that the same mistakes never again need be repeated. However, the fact was that between audiences and composers a gap was born.

A second reason for the success of Darmstadt is, of course, more complicated. Substantial sums from the American Marshall Plan were used to build a network of West German radio stations. Radio stations were the biggest supporters of new music. Practically speaking, each of them founded a symphony orchestra. With the support of the United States, radio stations were able to pay good salaries to musicians and conductors, without having to worry about ticket sales. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra became one of the world’s best, and many other German radio orchestras attained an exceptionally high level of expertise. Early electronic music was composed almost exclusively in radio station studios. WDR in Cologne was the absolute ground zero for electronic music in the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s.

The CIA was eagerly supporting the avant-garde in the west. The main content of its strange doctrine was to demonstrate to the countries of the Warsaw Pact that the incomparable superiority of capitalism also extended to the field of music.1 While in East Germany they were still cobbling together fugues, Boulez and companions were constructing compositions according to tables of musical parameters in which every, that is, every element of musical experience was finally subjected to mathematical discipline. That was real progress! Communism did not collapse on that, but you had to admire the attempt. David and Goliath once again.

Darmstadt’s leading figures were not only gifted composers; they were also eminent demagogues and practical men of action. Boulez’s quips from his youthful years are legendary: Blow up all opera houses! The composer who doesn’t understand the historical necessity of serialism is useless! Schönberg is DEAD!

These men (there were practically no women in the group) placed themselves so strongly in positions at different levels of European and American cultural life that the next generation was somehow left in between, almost at though they didn’t exist. Only the young generation of today, Thomas Ades and company, are able to see Darmstadt’s forefathers in the right perspective, namely, as a stage already passed about which it’s not even worth arguing (as for myself, a musician who is one generation older, I still see something relevant). Many in my age group hardly object if I state that my generation’s most important task and greatest challenge has been to find the way out of the backyard of modernism. At this point opinions diverge: some of us take post-serialism itself as a clear point of departure; some are weary of it once and for all; some are trying to create a synthesis.

I moved to Los Angeles at the beginning of the 1990s, in the midst of a very unproductive compositional period. From the perspective of fifteen years later, I now know that it was a fortunate decision, even though at the time I had no idea what I was getting into. I believe I can say that it was the move to California that gave me the opportunity and the reason to find my voice and my identity. The distance, both geographically as well as metaphorically, has been a great inspiration.

Finland is overwhelmingly the most homogenous culture I know. That, of course, is both a strength and a weakness. Even though Finland is on the periphery of Europe and quite actively resists outside cultural influences, we are nevertheless part of the European canon and the European value system, expressed in sentences like the following:

As we all know, Los Angeles is an endless development spread over an inconceivably broad area to which there is no real centre and where well over a hundred languages are spoken. When Mr. Salonen stepped out on Sunset Boulevard (or drove his car at 16 miles an hour in a traffic jam), the Eurocentric cultural-value mechanism that he stands for was suddenly shown in a grotesque and irrelevant light. I realised that in this astonishing and downright bewildering cultural diversity where nothing is quite what it seems; it is difficult to justify the value and current interest of some phenomenon on the basis of a European intellectual heritage. I sat, hopeless, in my sauna on the city’s west side and slugged a whiskey. And if I were to propose a new question? Instead of asking what is right and what is wrong, in other words, instead of asking what is the artist’s moral and historic responsibility in a Hegelian sense, I could perhaps re-phrase the whole question anew. (Do you remember those times when historical necessity was talked about daily? Serialism is not an aesthetic choice; it is right, because one cannot stop history, and music like all other phenomena climbs to an ever-higher level in the dialectical historical process. Britten and Shostakovich and Reich and Dutilleux are wrong. Oh, doubly sweet but bitter memories!)

Earlier I mentioned a certain morning in the mid-1990s, when I had a vision. I woke up early in Santa Monica. The sun was shining. Hummingbirds were magically suspended in front of the bougainvilleas. My little daughters were still sound asleep. I made a cup of coffee, walked into my studio, and I felt free. I was indeed far from everything; I was no longer young; experienced, but not yet tired out. I thought that the question might be posed as follows: how do I feel when I hear music? By feelings in this connection I don’t mean only emotions, but also (and perhaps even more), I mean music’s physical impact, that is, some kind of basic musical experience before cultural context is considered. If all sensations (that is, ‘feelings’, meaning the whole entity consisting of feelings and physical experiences) could be measured on a scale of pleasure to pain,2 how would that influence my choices as a composer? Or my decisions as the artistic director of a huge cultural institution?

The idea that the composer does not think of the public at all when writing music is patently absurd and even irresponsible. However, this inconceivable idea was a very common starting point for many in the not-too-distant past, and echoes of these principles still enter the discourse even today. The romantic nineteenth century idea of an artist (the lonely, preferably suffering, genius) is still seen as valid in some quarters, especially in the German-speaking world. I’m always thinking of the audience when I compose. Each choice in the course of the compositional process (nearly each) is based on the effort to create a certain kind of experience for the listener. I myself, of course, my ears and my taste, represent the audience at the time I’m creating the composition. My entire work as a musician and as the director of a cultural institution is based on the premise that I am not markedly different from other people. What moves me probably moves countless others. If I feel deep enjoyment, I believe that most human beings would feel the same way in a similar situation given the same stimulus.

I believe that in mankind’s early stages music and language were the same. This language-music complex was an instrument of deep emotion and inner life. When the hunter-gatherer culture gradually developed into an agrarian culture, a precise language was needed to describe the outside world in the most exact terms. At this stage language and music grew apart. Language became a brilliant descriptive tool. It remained the task of music to describe that which cannot be described, to speak that which cannot be spoken, to transmit human beings’ deepest feelings and most ineffable experiences to one another.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, 2006
Translator: Glenda Dawn Goss, 2007

1 Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 2000).
2 Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2003).


back to top