Michael Tilson Thomas Quotes

Music is essentially an emotional language, so you want to feel something from the relationships and build music based on those feelings.

I think that creative work, music in particular, is a conveyor of inner emotional life. I don't feel one way all the time, so I don't want my music to feel the same way all the time.

Wagner manages to convey emotion with music better than anyone, before or since.

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.

I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy.

Each song is a small universe to me. Each song has a story of its own. Each has a full life to express in order to be complete, so it often happens that the building to a big crescendo feels right in the recording or writing process.

Dance music is an emotional journey. It's how well you can make people feel something that they haven't felt.

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I'm able to go with 'Portlandia' has a wider range, but also a brighter range.

I hear music as narrative.

But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.

I like it when songs develop in some way. Four minutes usually isn't enough time for something to develop musically.

There's a great energy and drive that takes precedence in a lot of rock and pop. It's about making a strong visceral connection. That's something that I think great classical music can have, too.

Through the music I hope to give it an arc that gives it a greater sense of a journey through the set rather than a bunch of songs.

Without a doubt, the best way to get to know me is through my music.

Music does not carry you along. You have to carry it along strictly by your ability to really just focus on that little small kernel of emotion or story.

New music is absolutely integral to classical music.

Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.

Each song is a lifetime, it begins and ends, and there's a journey taken within the songs.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I'm going through or what's going on in my life at that moment.

The whole deal with my music has been the emotional quality.

I don't think Beethoven expresses religious truth. He expresses a human truth.

What music is better able to do than language is to represent the complexity of human emotional states.