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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 living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me."
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"When can you understand that the music you play is very good? It is when people look at you but see no one, no one but the music!"
"As the strings of a lute are apart though they quiver the same music."
"To understand fully the importance of music, you must try to image a world without music! Such a world would be a world of hopelessness and boredom!"
"As I fingered my way through the songs, I felt my worries slough away. My music has always been the best remedy for my dark moods. As I sang, even my bruises seemed to pain me less."
"So when a man surrenders to the sound of music and lets its sweet, soft, mournful strains, which we have just described, be funnelled into his soul through his ears, and gives up all his time to the glamorous moanings of song, the effect at first on his energy and initiative of mind, if he has any, is to soften it as iron is softened in a furnace, and made workable instead of hard and unworkable: but if he persists and does not break the enchantment, the next stage is that it melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut, and he has become what Homer calls "a feeble fighter"."
Explore more quotes by Michael Tilson Thomas
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
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