Foreign Bodies is an orchestral composition in three movements by the Finnish composer Esa-Pekka Salonen.
"[2] Stephen Johnson of BBC Music Magazine similarly lauded it as "strongly argued, bursting with energy and full of the kind of ravishing sound-vistas that makes one want to go back and indulge again and again.
"[3] Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times praised Foreign Bodies for its "vivid application of orchestral color and the inner clockwork structure" and wrote:Salonen's Foreign Bodies, a three-movement study in musical physicality for a very large orchestra, has built-in musical viruses.
[4]Arnold Whittall of Gramophone was more critical of the work, however, writing:Foreign Bodies, with its governing image of nature under threat, is too amorphous to create a genuinely visceral excitement.
The short finale – 'Dance' – works best, with some effective rhythmic cross-cutting, but even this grows clotted in texture: it's too reluctant to expose, juxtapose or superimpose its mechanisms in ways which would bring much-needed light and air to the music.