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This continuity of sound and form was something that I became really interested in from working with Ligeti. He was always going on about how form has to be continuous.
The underlying process in Northern music tends to be slower and continuous, whatever's happening on the surface; in Southern music the underlying process is always faster.
I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.
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.
I don't believe in an annual dose of film music for the sake of it being film music. If we program film music, it will be because there is a real artistic reason for doing so.
The Northern idea of form is more of a process. The various units of the form overlap. You can't tell where some things stop and new things start. This is typical of Sibelius.
If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music concert. To play something old was really an exception.
Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.
The sound was my greatest concern. There were certain difficulties getting used to the way every musician can hear his or herself, the way each of them relates to the musician in the next seat.
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.
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.
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 went to work one morning, and outside my door was Cindy Crawford in a black bra, and I thought that very clearly the building is making progress in integrating itself into various layers of our culture.
There is more openness in LA to possibilities than on the East Coast of America. There is a pioneering spirit there that stems from the reason people went out there in the first place-to find something new.
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.
Conducting is intensely social. You work with a hundred people every day. You collaborate, you try to focus their thoughts, you try to give them a concept, you try to inspire them, and it's actually exhausting.
It would be very tempting to say that why paint because we have Michelangelo, we have Leonardo [Da Vinci], we have all these guys. Why waste your time, because most likely you're not going to be on that level anyway.
If the seams are showing, there is something wrong with the performance or the construction of the piece. This idea is completely at odds with our modern visual experience, because everything today is based on montage.
Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.
If we always thought like that, why would we study physics, why would we think of cosmology, why would we do any kind of research? Because we know already so much that there is no one person who can contain all that information.
Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.
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.
We're not talking about an elite art form from the price point of view. We have a building in L.A. that is incredibly open, exciting, inviting, and all that, and there's no reason for this music not to be part of everybody's everyday life.
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.
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 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.
We need new art. Old art cannot do that. It can do lots of other things, and of course humanity hasn't changed that much in the last thousand or two thousand years.So that the old Greek dramas are still at the very heart, core, of human experience, but still we need new stuff.
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 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?
Coming from a sort of very rigid European type of training to this culture which is just a little more open - a lot more open, and kind of curious, and asking different sorts of questions.Because the problem for me was that the European modernist movement in the '70s was all about right or wrong. Some things were right and you were dealing with the truth, as it were, and then some things were wrong and therefore not allowed.
You know, in some ways conducting is counter-intuitive. It's like winter driving in Finland - if you skid, the natural reaction is to fight with the wheel and jam on the brakes, which is the quickest way to get killed. What you have to do is let go, and the car will right itself. It's the same when an orchestra loses its ensemble. You have to resist the temptation to semaphore, and let the orchestra find its own way back to the pulse.
We're dealing with music that is being played by traditional instruments in a specifically built building called a concert hall. But classical is not - the reference is wrong, because classical on one hand refers to one period in musical history, which is Mozart, Hayden, Beethoven, which is a fine period in musical history, but it was a while ago.On the other hand, it sort of alludes to some kind of "class," which A, is not true; B, is kind of detrimental to the whole idea. Because the point is that this music is available and it's actually relatively reasonably priced.