Politics & Power Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

There is a quiet sting in that “grudgingly,” a single word that exposes how cultural prestige gets policed in supposedly cosmopolitan rooms. Michael Tilson Thomas isn’t recounting a quaint tour anecdote; he’s sketching the old hierarchy of classical music in which Europe functions as the canon’s customs office and American repertoire arrives as a suspicious import. The sentence is built like a backstage confession: “I would propose” signals diplomacy, the careful language of a guest who knows he’s borrowing authority, while “accepted from time to time” makes the gatekeeping sound routine, almost bureaucratic.

The intent is less to complain than to document what it takes to expand a program when tradition is treated as moral law. As a conductor, Tilson Thomas is describing repertoire as cultural argument: to propose an American piece in a European hall is to challenge an inherited story that serious music moves one way, from the Old World outward. The subtext is that the resistance wasn’t about quality alone; it was about identity. “American pieces” carried baggage: modernism without pedigree, vernacular influence, a whiff of Hollywood or jazz that threatened the self-image of institutions built around Brahms and Mahler.

Context matters: “25 years ago” points to a moment before today’s more explicit push for programming diversity, when “international” often meant “European with a passport.” Tilson Thomas’s line lands as a small record of cultural change: acceptance came, but only through persistence, and only intermittently. That’s how canons shift in real life - not by revelation, but by repeated, strategic asking.