Michael Tilson Thomas quotes
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“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].”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
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“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
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“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
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“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“The world changes when there's music in it.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
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“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“What happens when the music stops? Where does it go?”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
“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.”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas -
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“This extraordinary group has absolutely captivated my imagination, knocked my socks off - what more can I say?”
-- Michael Tilson Thomas
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