Music has just as much to do with movement and body as it does soul and intellect.
In Europe, there is so much tradition, and everyone has established ideas as to what art should be and what it has always been.
The music I turn out these days is the kind of music I want to hear myself.
There's so much energy exchange [in conduction], so you get back a lot, of course, but you also have to give a lot. It's kind of high-energy thing.
I started conducting lessons and I realized that this is actually something I like doing.
Lots of really interesting people move to U.S and decide to work here, because of this whole attitude and openness. I'm absolutely convinced that this is just the beginning. In a couple decades we will see an even more dramatic change.
I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.
I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.
I feel that this is my artistic home, and I'm very happy to be a California artist together with many others who are not from here originally but who decided to make this the center of their activities. There's something about that that I find very inspiring and satisfying.
If somebody had told me when I was starting composition in Helsinki in the '70s that I would end up in L.A. and to describe that journey, those 17 years with the philharmonic and building the hall and this and that, I would have said, "This is a fairy tale of the first order."
I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.
I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.
There is something very special about this part of the world [U.S], which is the openness and the curiosity and the lack of prejudice and the lack of generally accepted norms as to what art should be and how an artist's career should go and all that.
I like this idea of identification with the local team. I think it's great. That's what an orchestra should be. It's an orchestra for its hometown, and it serves the people.
The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.
When an artist works today or whenever, it's not about creating immortal masterpieces, because that's the one thing we don't decide ourselves.
I actually don't like this term, "classic." It's wrong, but we don't have a better word at the moment.
Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.
There was this kind of mildly annoying mythology about conductor Like biker should riding a Harley-Davidson on an LP cover, and wearing a sort of a leather suit.
Somehow, conductor as this superhuman conduit between the masters and the masterpieces and the immortals.
The sort of commercial parameters of classical music changed after the [World War II] , and the whole industry became more backward-looking.
Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.
Our industry [classic music] has kind of retarded into this kind of endless cover-producing thing, and it's a pity.
Of course performing talent, that's clear. Maybe this is not so well-known among young people who are interested in music, who are talented in music, but they're trying to figure out how to go about it.
I think we still do have a PR problem in the sense that these institutions portray themselves quite often as a museum without the contemporary wing. For a young cutting-edge person, why would you get into that sort of business, which is very clearly geared towards dead or almost dead people?
