Creativity Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

Tilson Thomas is drawing a hard line between virtuosity as craft and music as relationship. “Technically” is the tell: he’s talking about the kind of admiration that lives in the mind, the conductor’s score-study pleasure in clever counterpoint, orchestration tricks, structural symmetry. Useful, even intoxicating. But it’s not enough to justify putting a piece in front of players and asking them to spend their finite emotional energy bringing it to life.

“I can’t do pieces” reads like a professional boundary, not a casual preference. A conductor’s repertoire is a public identity and an ethical choice: what gets rehearsed, recorded, toured, funded. So the subtext is a quiet rejection of programming-as-flex - selecting works to prove intelligence, modernity, or mastery. He’s insisting that interpretation isn’t a technical puzzle to solve; it’s an act of persuasion. If he doesn’t feel “direct contact,” he can’t credibly transmit the work’s stakes to an orchestra, and the performance risks becoming a well-lit museum display: immaculate, airless.

The phrase “direct contact” is almost physical, suggesting immediacy, even vulnerability. It frames music-making as intimacy rather than scholarship. In the late-20th/early-21st century classical world Tilson Thomas helped shape - where audiences are skeptical, institutions are risk-averse, and new music is often defended with abstract arguments - this is a practical manifesto. He’s saying the most convincing case for any repertoire, old or new, is felt conviction. Technique can earn respect; contact earns trust.