Best quotes by Michael Tilson Thomas on Music

Checkout quotes by Michael Tilson Thomas on Music

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

  - Michael Tilson Thomas
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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