Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomas
Michael Tilson Thomasis an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is currently music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and artistic director of the New World Symphony Orchestra...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth21 December 1944
CountryUnited States of America
add children expertise given great involving might music pleasant scary seen technical
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake.
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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.
certain concepts earlier felt performed
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.
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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.
direct
I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them.
mean addresses doe
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.
music world
The world changes when there's music in it.
trust years san-francisco
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.
song kids simple
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.
summer song religious
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.