JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Conductor and educator Michael Tilson Thomas died yesterday at his home in San Francisco after enduring an aggressive type of brain cancer. He was 81 years old. MTT, as he was called, was best known as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony and co-founder of the New World Symphony, which is a training orchestra for young professionals. Jeff Lunden has this remembrance.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: If there was anything that marked Michael Tilson Thomas' performances, it was his spirit of spontaneity. That's the view of former San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joshua Kosman. He says that was true whether he was conducting American music or Mahler.
JOSHUA KOSMAN: There are many things that Michael brought to the San Francisco Symphony, but if we had to put our finger on just one of them, it would be the act of making this orchestra kind of almost like a jazz band in its pizzazz and liveliness and unpredictability.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS & SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY'S "SYMPHONY NO. 5 IN C-SHARP MINOR, PT. 1: I. TRAUERMARSCH")
LUNDEN: Pizzazz came naturally to Michael Tilson Thomas. His parents worked for movie studios as he was growing up in Southern California. And a generation earlier, his parents were stars of the Yiddish theater, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky.
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BESSIE THOMASHEFSKY: (Singing in non-English language).
LUNDEN: MTT told WHYY's Fresh Air that while his parents wanted him to study science, his grandmother had other ideas.
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MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS: She said, your parents are very lovely people, but terribly conventional, you're like me, you're an adventurer, you'll have to prove something.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICHEAL TILSON THOMAS & LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA'S "CONCERTINO FOR TWELVE INSTRUMENTS")
LUNDEN: And prove, he did. As a teenager, Tilson Thomas worked with Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. He majored in music at USC, trained as a conductor at Tanglewood, was mentored by Leonard Bernstein. He took a job with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as an assistant conductor. But when its music director became ill, MTT got his big break. He took over for a season conducting standard orchestral repertoire, but he also programmed contemporary atonal music, as he told the BBC.
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TILSON THOMAS: Those pieces resonate for me, and I recognize that it's part of my responsibility as a performer to create opportunities for that music to be heard and as an educator to introduce young people to the idea of playing that music.
LUNDEN: Tilson Thomas was music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra. But he eventually made a home with the San Francisco Symphony. He spent 25 years as its music director, and his presence extended beyond music, says critic Joshua Kosman.
KOSMAN: Michael was a real totemic figure in San Francisco. He was out as a gay man and eventually married his longtime partner, Joshua Robison. He was certainly, you know, a figure on the social scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS & SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY'S "RODEO: HOE-DOWN")
LUNDEN: MTT and Robison were together for almost 50 years before Robison died this February. Joshua Kosman says...
KOSMAN: If you had to point to a single thing by which the musical world is different for Michael having been here, it would certainly be the New World Symphony.
LUNDEN: MTT co-founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach in 1987, a three-year fellowship to prepare young musicians for professional careers. Over 1,300 fellows have performed in orchestras around the globe. One of the capstones of MTT's tenure was to commission a new building from Frank Gehry as a home for the organization. It was designed so the public can watch concerts for free in a live video feed in a park outside, he told PBS.
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TILSON THOMAS: This idea was very much part of the new building to include a large wall of the building, which would be a projection surface.
LUNDEN: Teaching music, sharing music, utilizing technology was all part of MTT's DNA. He also founded the YouTube Symphony, where musicians auditioned online and were selected by viewers. Along the way, MTT won a dozen Grammy Awards and received a Kennedy Center Honor. Michael Tilson Thomas said he lived by a kind of musical Hippocratic oath.
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TILSON THOMAS: Never perform with your heart not being in it. Never allow yourself to get to the point where it's a job. Always make sure that your spirit is focused so that communicating music to other people is a central priority for you.
LUNDEN: For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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