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"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."
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"Flowers are the beautiful hairs of the Mother Spring! Don't pluck them!"

"Eagle's flight of loneliness soars so high Around its sigh, no more alone the sky Other birds remain away, clouds pass byBetween shrouds of life and haze sun rays die."

"Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, 'inhale great draughts of space,' wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands."

"Listen to what the sky is telling you."

"The moon hung over the planet Earth, a dead thing over a dying thing."

"Nature is the guardian of Africa. While the sun lights the African sky in day time, the moon begs the world to help her lighting Africa in the night."

"Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves."

"When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us."
Explore more quotes by 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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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