Creativity Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

Tilson Thomas is batting away a backhanded compliment: the idea that a conductor’s legacy is basically a list of “programs,” a curatorial resume. Sure, he concedes, repertoire matters. But he refuses the contemporary prestige economy where taste-making and branding get mistaken for artistry. The pivot is surgical: “mostly I’m proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.” Not what they played. How they sounded while doing it.

That “way” is doing heavy lifting. It points to a cultivated institutional voice: the ensemble’s blend, attack, flexibility, and risk tolerance; the collective confidence to make decisions rather than merely execute them. It’s also a quiet rebuke to a conductor-centered narrative. MTT, a figure often associated with ambitious American programming and media-savvy outreach, relocates credit to the musicians and the long, unglamorous work of building a culture of listening inside an organization.

The subtext is that programming is the easy part to document and the hardest part to falsify. Anyone can assemble a season that looks enlightened on paper: Mahler here, Adams there, a token of diversity, a splash of modernism. The truth of an era is in rehearsal habits, the trust between podium and players, the shared aesthetics that let an orchestra carry a phrase in the same direction even when no one is “leading” in the obvious way.

It’s an exit line with values: a conductor’s real monument isn’t the brochure. It’s an ensemble that can keep speaking in that voice after he leaves the room.