Politics & Power Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

Tilson Thomas is smuggling a manifesto into a compliment. “Being an American musician” isn’t framed as belonging to a tradition so much as accepting a dare: the job description includes risk. The line works because it flips the usual prestige logic. In much of classical music, legitimacy is still measured against Europe - the canon, the conservatories, the inherited “right way” to sound. Tilson Thomas, a conductor who built major projects around living composers and undervalued American voices, argues that the American claim to seriousness is not pedigree but appetite.

“Adventurous” does a lot of quiet political work here. It’s not just about quirky programming or genre mashups. It’s a defense of pluralism as an aesthetic principle: America’s musical identity is a noisy collision of immigrant lineages, Black innovation, popular forms, and institutional ambition. If that’s your ecosystem, the only honest response is to explore, steal, hybridize, and keep moving. The subtext is also a rebuke to a certain kind of gatekeeping - the musician who treats the repertoire like sacred property rather than a living city.

The context matters: Tilson Thomas came of age as American orchestras professionalized, recorded, and branded themselves globally, while “American music” fought for space on concert stages that still defaulted to German and Russian monuments. His sentence reassures younger artists that restlessness isn’t a flaw; it’s the point. Adventure becomes patriotism without flag-waving: a cultural identity defined less by what you preserve than by what you’re willing to try.