Michael Tilson Thomas Quotations

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them.

They are representations of many shared hours of collaboration between us all. That's the real nature of the relationship the orchestra and I are trying to build.

And at the same time, you are of course a performer, but it's very important that you understand that your role as a performer is to get the best performance from those wonderful colleagues that you have the chance to work with.

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.

The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

But if I can be convinced and then through the work that we do together, the orchestra can really be convinced of the big sweep of that communication that the piece suggests, then the audience will get it and it will be a good experience for all of us.

But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.

You know, they were returning to the language of the people and trying to use musical language, particularly as Copland did to create a musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake.

In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you'd go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you'd learn to sing a lot of songs.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

But a large symphony orchestra basically is a repertory company and it has a very enormous repertoire and it is important for the performers to be able to know how to shift focus so that they instantly become part of the sound world that a particular repertoire demands.

But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile.

If we are able to get inside the music and inhabit it convincingly enough, it will cause everyone to find each other in this new psychological space. And that's most exciting.

It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.

The world changes when there's music in it.

This extraordinary group has absolutely captivated my imagination, knocked my socks off - what more can I say?

The real deep text of music and the whole reason that it has continued with the profundity and urgency that it has for over a thousand years, has to do with what the notes say, what the notes witness, different experiences of hope or doubt that people are able to distill and encode and pass on in this way.

A conundrum of music is that music brings people together, yet to become a skilled musician involves a certain amount of lonely time in which you're just figuring it out, practicing.

The way you survive in the performing arts is by having a sense of your audience, and doing things which entertain and satisfy the audience, but in a more important way, cause the audience to question many things.

When I was a kid, three years old, I couldn't walk by the piano without reaching up and trying to play a few notes on it. There are kids who are just drawn to listening to music and dancing to it and trying to conduct.

Being an American musician means being adventurous.

What happens when the music stops? Where does it go?

If you're alive, you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

Thank God for movie music. It preserves the rich vocabulary in classical music through challenging times.

Part of my big message with all this is that if you are alive, you know all you need to know about the message of classical music, because more than any other music, it is about the way life really is.

It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music in something like Schubert or Bach because the further back you go, the less bells and whistles there are.

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where "now" actually is.

Part of my mission is simply that: to bring the world of the arts, particularly classical music, closer to people so they don't feel that it is something remote that they have to specially prepare themselves for, or dress up for.

Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years, and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

Pop music, which I deeply admire and wish I could play better than I can, is based on expressing one mood, one feeling at a time. Classical music is by its very nature involved with different kinds of music, constantly transforming one another, which is more akin to the way our experience of life really is.

If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know [about music].