Politics & Power Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

Tilson Thomas is making a quietly radical claim in polite, conductorly language: the real story of American music is not a march toward refinement, but a widening of what gets counted as serious. “The whole path” sounds historical and inevitable, yet the engine he names is cultural recognition - the slow, contested process of admitting that style isn’t hierarchy. By foregrounding “stylistic diversity,” he’s pushing back against an old gatekeeping reflex in classical institutions: the idea that legitimacy flows from European lineages while everything else is “influence,” “color,” or, worse, entertainment.

The key phrase is “vernacular traditions.” He’s not talking about folk as museum artifact; he means the musics people actually make where they live - blues, jazz, gospel, Broadway, Latin forms, rock, hip-hop’s ancestors in rhythm and speech. Calling them “vernacular” is a strategic compliment and a challenge: it dignifies the local and the popular while also exposing how often concert culture has treated those sources as raw material to be “elevated” by symphonic polish.

Context matters. Tilson Thomas came up in a late-20th-century American classical world trying to reconcile its self-image with its repertoire: programming Copland and Gershwin, commissioning living composers, canonizing Duke Ellington, and grappling with whose stories orchestras tell. The subtext is institutional: if American music’s defining move is recognition, then orchestras, conservatories, and critics aren’t neutral observers. They are the bottleneck. The quote nudges them to stop acting like curators of a single tradition and start behaving like citizens of a plural one.