Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes

31 quotes in 494 categories

• 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].
• The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.
• What happens when the music stops? Where does it go?
• 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…
• 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.
• You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!
• The world changes when there's music in it.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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