Quotes by Michael Tilson Thomas - Page 1

Conductors are performers.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Performers
Conductors
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The world changes when there's music in it.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Music
World
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Being an American musician means being adventurous.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Adventurous
Mean
Musician
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What happens when the music stops? Where does it go?
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Doe
Happens
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Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Disguise
Important
Volume
Extreme
Content
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If you're alive, you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Alive
Classical Music
Ifs
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The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Inspiration
Motivation
Sadness
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I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Contact
Direct
Direct Contact
Technically
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You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Composer
Music Is
Your Favorite
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Thank God for movie music. It preserves the rich vocabulary in classical music through challenging times.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Challenges
Thank God
Vocabulary
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This extraordinary group has absolutely captivated my imagination, knocked my socks off - what more can I say?
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Imagination
Groups
Sock
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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 / Conductor
Inspiration
Motivation
Needs
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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 / Conductor
Mean
Wonderful
Years
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Groups
People
Trying
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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 / Conductor
Conductor
Directors
Editors
Hybrid
Hybridity
Profession
Coach
Editor
Fundamentally
Trainer
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
New Music
Orchestra
Music World New
Composers
Music World Living
Programs
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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 / Conductor
Architecture
Addresses
Classical Music
Doe
Mean
Classical
Each One
Musics
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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 / Conductor
Nature
Collaboration
Orchestra
Real
Trying
Shared
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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 / Conductor
Accepted
Conducting
Europe
Firsts
Propose
Years
Years Ago
From Time To Time
Guest
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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 / Conductor
Kids
Defining
Human Experience
Simple
Song
Associated
Dances
Defining Moment
Grasp
Presented
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Psychological
Inhabit
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Lonely
People
Together
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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 / Conductor
Religious
Song
Summer
Summer Camp
People Training Know
Camp
Earlier
Sang
So Many People
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Concepts
Demonstration
Representation
Life Music Important
Life Music My Life
Earlier
Performed
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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 / Conductor
American Music
Diversity
Importance
Path
Recognition
Vernacular
Stylistic
Traditions
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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 / Conductor
Powerful
Unique
Years
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Alive
Needs
Way
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
San Francisco
Symphony
Francisco
People Way Important
Programs
Mostly
Plays
San
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Musical
People Feel Trying
All Americans
Particularly
Returning
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Art
Important
Way
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Kids
Play
Years
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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 / Conductor
Trust
Firsts
Program
San Francisco
Trust Me
Years
Trust Work Music
Composers
Francisco
Gradually
San
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Colleagues
Best Time Work
Best Work Time
Performer
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Art
Dresses
People
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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 / Conductor
Journey
Classical Music
Doe
Musician
Psychological
Thinking
Transformation
Underestimated
Wide
Best Music Always
Classical
Moods
Musicians
Voyage
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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 / Conductor
Experience
Involvement
Mean
Moving
Musical
Understanding
Addressing
Big Problem
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Add
Asia
Expertise
Involving
Lessons
Pleasant
Scary
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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 / Conductor
Experience
Communication
Orchestra
Together
Work Good Experience
Work Experience Good
Piece
Sweep
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Art World
Contemporary
Contemporary Art
Hostile
Not Interested
Art Music World
Collect
Pose
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Bells
Musical
Pushing
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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 / Conductor
Enormous
Focus
Important
Orchestra
Particular
Performers
Sound
Symphony
World Important Know
Instantly
Large
Repertoire
Shift
Symphony Orchestra
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Different Experiences
Real
Years
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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.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Feelings
Play
Wish
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I have a strange situation as far as my name is concerned, because of course, what should my name really be? Is it my traditional Jewish name? Or this curious name my parents put together, partially to honor departed family members, and partially to keep me away from the absolute craziness of my grandparents' fame and the intrusiveness of their fans? So many people call me "MTT," and some do say, "Oh Maestro," and some are comfortable calling me Michael.
Michael Tilson Thomas / Conductor
Departed
Parent
People
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Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes - Page 1

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