>> Kazem Abdullah: The New
World Symphony has long been at the forefront of developments
in the arts and in education. And over the course of
its more than 30 years, Michael Tilson Thomas
has mentored thousands of young musicians at critical
junctures in their artistic and professional development. I too am an alumnus of
the New World Symphony where I was a clarinet
fellow in the early 2000s. And my time at New
World was transformative and musically inspiring. Concerts from the Library
of Congress was very excited to bring a group of
fellows to perform a program of chamber works
this past January. [unintelligible] , in a similar
fashion to New World Symphony, we are forging ahead
with a virtual season and featuring the musicians in two very exciting one hour
programs with music by Dvo ák, Walton, Frederick
Tillis, Carlos Simon, Béla Bartók, and
Charles Wourinen. So, I am so pleased to have
with me today the founder and artistic director of
the New World Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas. Michael, welcome, it's so
great to hear from you again. Welcome. >> Michael Tilson Thomas:
Well, thank you so much Kazem, and I look forward in
our future conversations to not being a disembodied
spirit as I am today. But we will get there. I think I should tell
your listeners, perhaps, since I'm one of the few people
that are positioned to do so, I want to tell you
about Kazem as a fellow of the New World Symphony. So, Kazem initially arrived
in New World as a clarinetist. And I thought, as we
were working together, where is this guy's mind? His mind is, you know, I don't
know that his mind is just so much involved with
playing the clarinet. What, what's going
on, what do I have? Then he said, oh, could I
perhaps conduct the Schoenberg Chamber Symphony, or could I
perhaps conduct the Charles Adams, John Adams [laughs]. >> Kazem Abdullah: John
Adams Chamber Symphony. No. [laughs] >> Michael Tilson Thomas:
Charles Adams Chamber Symphony. That would be interesting. The John Adams Chamber Symphony. And these very, very
intricate and complex scores that he was doing,
I mean, this was not like the usual fledgling
conductor saying could I conduct Siegfried Idyll or a Haydn
symphony or something like that. This was very ambitious,
sophisticated music, which he pulled off
with fantastic aplomb, and the rest is history. So, I just thought I'd give that
little insight that I was very, I feel very privileged to
have been there at that moment when Kazem decided to act on
all these wonderful things. So, we're this chamber program,
which as usual, is quite varied. I mean, we're so lucky to
have as our sort of director of chamber music programs at
New World Michael Linville, who is a very sophisticated
musician, he's a phenomenal pianist and
harp player and percussionist and has a real perspective
in music. And when he took over
the chamber series, one of the missions
I gave him was to expand this beyond the usual
string quartet, piano quintet, occasionally maybe
a clarinet quintet. But all, everything very
string based into something which would have considerably
greater variety of combinations. And he's done that phenomenally. >> Kazem Abdullah:
No, that's very true. I mean, it's a very, it's
a very dynamic program. I mean, it starts off
with, it starts off with a traditional piano trio from the American
composer Carlos Simon. And it's basically
a program of trios. There's also the Bartók Sonata
for Two Pianos and Percussion and the Wuorinen Horn Trio. And to me, you know, both you
and I have, especially you, have tremendous experience,
tremendous experience with Wuorinen's music. And to me, Wuorinen's
Horn Trio holds its own to the other great horn trios
when I think of the horn trios of Brahms and of Ligeti. And to me, Wuorinen's
is, of course, so completely original
in its conception. You had a long working
relationship with Charles Wuorinen,
and premiered one of his last orchestral
works, Sudden Changes. And actually the New World
Symphony premiered his last work, the Second
Percussion Symphony. How were you introduced to
Wuorinen, and what drew you to his music, and what
do you enjoy about it? >> Michael Tilson Thomas: I
first met him in Los Angeles. I would have been about
18, I would think, something like that, 18 or 19. And I was playing in a
large chamber ensemble, the Monday Evening Concert
Series was organizing there. And he and Harvey Sollberger
were visiting LA doing their music, which at that time was
considered very, very difficult, borderline comprehensible, and
he was conducting his Concerto for 10 Instruments
or Chamber Concerto, I can't remember
what it was called. I was playing celeste
in the ensemble. And there was Charles. And he was very clear, he
made this music which none of us had really
comprehended before, make sense. And even from time to time,
he injected a certain element of humor, which not
everyone grasped. Like we were in the middle
of working on a piece, and he would say, "Oh, yes,
and now," he said it with kind of clenched teeth in the way
he spoke, "and now we come to the famous Roller
Coaster passage which has been the delight of
players and audiences everywhere in the world they have heard
it" or something like that. And it was said with such
a kind of ironic twist. And then I perceived that
that really was the thing about Charles. He was uncompromising
as a musician, and certainly had opinions. >> Kazem Abdullah: Yes. [laughs] >> Michael Tilson Thomas: But
also, he also did have a kind of sense of humor about the
whole thing, about kind of like, isn't this amazing that
human beings are going on making this music of
such wonderful intricacy and ghoulish obscurity
in spite of the fact that society is mostly going in
a completely opposite direction. He thought that was amazing. >> Kazem Abdullah:
That is very amusing. Well, also on the program
for this particular program, we have the Bartók Sonata
for Two Pianos and Percussion. And, yeah, you know,
you're such a, you know, you're such an accomplished
pianist, and I was just curious, have you ever actually
performed this work yourself? And what are your thoughts
about this particular work and unique combination? >> Michael Tilson Thomas: Sure. Yeah, I did perform the
piece back when I was in college, something like that. And it has all sorts
of difficulties. It's a fistful of notes for
the pianist in the first place. Lots of chords that
you have to play. That's not always the
case with Bartók, although Bartók does have a
fixation in certain pieces, like the Second Piano
Concerto seems to demonstrate that Bartók had no
difficulty in playing passages in thirds, for example. Everything is in thirds. This piece is much more
block kind of chords. And you can still hear in places
that kind of harmonic language that Bartók was using
in still earlier pieces, which were much thicker
and more chordal. This piece is quite tricky because the way it is notated
is not the way it sounds. And it's that puzzle that
sometimes exists with composers, perhaps especially
contemporary composers. Do you have an obligation to make it sound the
way it's written? Or do you just kind
of go with the fact that as you hear it it seems
to come out another way, more viscerally perhaps? And that's very much
the case in this piece, where even the slightest little
momentum of tempo going forward or backward could
have a complete change of what the reception
of the piece is. And this ensemble of
New World fellows, this was the first piece that
they had done in the season. And it just came together
so quickly, because there's such virtuosi and
musicians, all of them. One thing I did want
to go back to saying about Charles's Horn Trio, which
is that his music got simpler and friendlier in
general as time went on. Especially in the last period. I wonder if that was partially
because he did quite a number of remarkable arrangements of
music by Machaut and Mozart and Purcell and quite
a number of composers, which he did very
sympathetically, and also with this
characteristic unusual Charles edginess. And it was very much a part
of what he was listening to did get into his music. So, his wonderful concerto
for cello called Five, for cello and, amplified
cello and instruments, was very much influenced by his
listening to a lot of recordings by the Egyptian singer,
Umm Kulthum, one of the most famous
singers of all time. And he listened to a
great deal of her music, of this popular Middle
Eastern music. And you could actually hear
it in the kind of melismas that he writes in
the cello part. I'm not quite sure. Maybe you know better than I exactly what the
influence is in the Horn Trio. But it certainly has
very beautiful lyrical and tonal passages in it
that all work in terms of his still very patrician idea
of what composing was about. I remember years ago,
one of the pieces of his that I commissioned or
performed the first time had, was still being written. In fact, he hadn't
even begun writing it. And I said, well, Charles, can you tell me anything
about the piece? And he said, well, yes, the first movement is 18
minutes and 15 seconds long. Really, I said, anything else
you could tell me about it? Nope. There are things, but
I think for clarity's sake, that's for sure, it's 18
minutes and 15 seconds long. And sure enough, you know,
that's, that's what it was. So, his way of thinking
about time and organizing it
was quite special. >> Kazem Abdullah:
That's very true. Yes. And I agree with you. He did kind of bring
more simplicity. I mean, one of the first
pieces that I got to work on of his was his Violin
Rhapsody and New York Notes. And, yeah, you know, yeah,
there's just sort of, these scores are
packed full of ideas and transformations
and things like this. And then to see sort of how
his writing changed from then to just, from then to like
the pieces that he wrote in the last two years,
you're absolutely right, he kind of brought
everything to the down scale and simplified everything. So, it was a sort of much less
formidable, or not formidable, but I would say daunting. So, that is very true. >> Michael Tilson Thomas: Yes,
it is oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> Kazem Abdullah: Oh, no,
no, please, no, that's all. >> Michael Tilson Thomas: No,
I was saying in my experience, he's not the only
composer to have gone through such a process. And one of the great examples of that was Elliott Carter's
Concerto for Orchestra, which was written,
Bernstein premiered it, and it was very intricate
and very thick. And then over the years. Elliott erased more
and more of the lines. So, when you look at it now,
it's considerably less crowded than it was when it
was first written. >> Kazem Abdullah: Yes. So, I just have sort of
two more general questions for you before we
end the conversation. And I just wanted to just
sort of get your insights, and just things about, you
know, how people move forward. And I'm sure you are
keeping busy with studying and writing and practicing
music. And I'm just curious,
in these last 11 months, have you made any interesting
insights or discoveries? Yeah, you know, as
musicians, we are always trying to prepare for what's next. And, you know, now we
have all had to kind of sit still for a bit. You know, I myself, I'm still
trying to find a silver lining, but I do think having
the time to sort of study and to free associate
without goals can actually get creativity and ideas flowing. >> Michael Tilson Thomas: Sure. At this time, I think we all
realized this was happening, and many of us, myself
included, said, okay, well, I think this is going
to be a long haul here, so let me make all of these
goals and resolutions of things which I'm going to
accomplish in this time. And now much further
on, I have to confess, I did not achieve
all those goals. But I did achieve some of
them, so I'm happy for the ones that I was able to achieve. And also I know that I
wasn't the only person to experience this,
what is the time, where is it, what
happened to it. A friend of mine was talking
to me, and I said, well, when did we last
speak about this? And he said, I think
it was last Blursday. >> Kazem Abdullah:
Last Blursday. Yeah, so it is all
kind of a blur. >> Michael Tilson Thomas: And
there has been that experience. What happened to
last week, you know? So, fortunately, I had a few
projects, which mostly had to do with going into my files and
taking out lots of manuscripts, musical and otherwise, and really finally
putting them in shape. I have so many pieces that
were almost ready to launch, that there was always a
performance or something else that I had to do that I
didn't quite get around to it, and I decided I'd go
back to these pieces. Some of them go back to
when I'm 19 years old, and that I would get them
in shape to be released and stop being embarrassed
about them. >> Kazem Abdullah: Okay,
that's very exciting. Is there anything you would want to share actually
with the audience? And if not, we can
cut this part out. This is just my own curiosity. >> Michael Tilson Thomas:
Well, the pieces maybe that were involved in the Music
Theater Project, I was working on back in the 70s and
into part of the 80s, and is a long piano piece that
I wrote, I can still remember. I was 19 years old, and I was in
my parent's house for a while, and I still remember
working on this piece in the latter part
of the afternoon. And it's amazing how
going back to this music from an earlier part
of your life allows you to totally reconnect with
who you were back then and every part of
the experience. It's very Proustian in that way. So, it's been an interesting
voyage for me to try and sympathetically reconnect
with somebody that I was such a long time ago, and who
still is somewhere inside of me, with all the other me's. >> Kazem Abdullah: I look
forward to being able to hear some of your
new works as they, as they come out to the public. I really look forward to
hearing some of those. My last question for you is,
you know, given your work with young musicians and
the future of orchestras, I would be interested in your,
in your really frank assessment of the current situation. Likely, there could be the loss
of some regional orchestras, et cetera, and maybe even
some larger institutions. That sort of remains to be seen. But I'm curious, what future
do you see for classical music, especially given the pandemic? And what advice would
you give a young musician or a mid-life musician today
who needs to navigate this time? And what possibilities for reinvention do you
see for classical music? >> Michael Tilson Thomas:
Well, there are many, many people doing all manner of
inventive things in the means at their disposal, online,
but also in little gatherings of people in permissible
situations wherever they are. And a lot of people
are quite enthusiastic about these new forms
of music communication. And not only the people
who are doing them, people who are experiencing
them are very happy to feel that there is this contact
with them, somebody's reaching out to them with beautiful
music, or exciting music, or attention grabbing music
of whatever kind it is. So, that's, that's really good. At the same time, I know that the major orchestras are
considering what their next plans are for auditioning. It's just a question of
when that's going to happen. But they do have a view of there
being a real future and wanting to bring new people
into the ensemble, as well as into the
hall to hear the pieces. I think everyone's probably
more connective with the idea of musicians now reaching
out directly to the audience, whether in person
or whether online, that's considered more essential
that a musician want to be in contact with members of
the audience, that the ideal of so many really very
excellent players of the past, which was I show up, I know
my part, I play it as well as I can, and then I go home,
is probably not where any of us are going to be living
in the future, that we're going to have to have more of a sense
of connection with our society and groups and individuals
within it in a sustaining way and in a way that includes
them in our vision in ways that we never have before. And the experience that we're
having during this challenging period is leading us in the
direction of understanding how to do those things
better, I hope. >> Kazem Abdullah:
I hope so too. I really do. Well, Michael, thank you
so much for taking the time to speak with me today. It's been wonderful to hear
your insights about the program, about music in general, and about all the
composers in the program. And we look forward to hopefully
having the New York Symphony fellows live and in person
at Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, D.C.
at some point in the not too distant future. So, thank you very much for taking the time
to speak with us. >> Michael Tilson Thomas: Thank
you so much for the invite, Kazem, and bravo to
everything you're doing. >> Kazem Abdullah: Goodbye.
