59 Quotes by Michael Tilson Thomas

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.