59 Quotes by Michael Tilson Thomas

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

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.

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.

The world changes when there’s music in it.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.