Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes

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.

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

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.

Conductors are performers.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

Being an American musician means being adventurous.

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.

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.

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.