Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.
From Michael Tilson Thomas
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.
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.
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.
Being an American musician means being adventurous.
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.
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.
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.
Conductors are performers.
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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