Composer Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

“You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!” quote by Michael Tilson Thomas — Download Open image

“You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!”

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More by Michael Tilson Thomas

If we are able to get inside the music and inhabit it convincingly enough, it will cause everyone to find each other in this…

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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,…

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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…

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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…

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Conductors are performers.

Michael Tilson Thomas

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The world changes when there's music in it.

Michael Tilson Thomas

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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…

Michael Tilson Thomas

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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

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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

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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…

Michael Tilson Thomas

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Being an American musician means being adventurous.

Michael Tilson Thomas

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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

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Explore all 43 Michael Tilson Thomas quotes

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“- Mom, can I tell them there that I'm Romanian? - Sure, why not tell them? - I was thinking that they wouldn't think... I'm bragging." (Dialogue with his mother before leaving for Vienna)”

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The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

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The architect is very interesting because the architect is the commander, meaning the one who commands all the workers. The architect is also the…

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If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

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Seen from the point of view of the composer, the most nonsensical practice is that of casting people in musicals who are unable to sing. No one would cast a dancing part with someone who cannot dance sufficiently to come up to professional standards. The same is true of acting. But when it comes to singing, more often than not…

Ernest Gold

I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted…

Missy Mazzoli