Words matter. These are the best Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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 be able to know how to shift focus so that they instantly become part of the sound world that a particular repertoire demands.
You know, they were returning to the language of the people and trying to use musical language, particularly as Copland did to create a musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I’m proud of the programs, but mostly I’m proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.
Being an American musician means being adventurous.
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.
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.
And at the same time, you are of course a performer, but it’s very important that you understand that your role as a performer is to get the best performance from those wonderful colleagues that you have the chance to work with.
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.
Conductors are performers.
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.
