Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes

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 director.

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].

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 to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

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

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 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.

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.

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 from time to time.

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

One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where "now" actually is.

Thank God for movie music. It preserves the rich vocabulary in classical music through challenging times.

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.

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.

Being an American musician means being adventurous.

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

What happens when the music stops? Where does it go?

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.

The world changes when there's music in it.

A conundrum of music is that music brings people together, yet to become a skilled musician involves a certain amount of lonely time in which you're just figuring it out, practicing.

This extraordinary group has absolutely captivated my imagination, knocked my socks off - what more can I say?