Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas

Mature wisdom and impish glee often share the stage in the music of Michael Tilson Thomas. Both rise from the heart of the very model of the all-round artist, affectionately known throughout the music world as “MTT.” Conductor, pianist, composer, communicator, teacher—he’s an American pioneer who has illuminated the classical canon, jazz standards, Broadway showstoppers, and a multitude of modernist and postmodern scores.

Grace trains the spotlight on MTT’s catalog of compositions, brought together in one all-encompassing album to mark his 80th-birthday year. Above all, it celebrates his gift for writing profoundly honest, emotionally engaging, tremendously tuneful pieces.

“As I look back on the works of these many years, I can remember clearly their original inspiration and the various turning points along the way where it was decided how things were going to proceed,” Michael Tilson Thomas tells Apple Music Classical. Grace, he notes, charts half a lifetime’s creative and personal development. “I can still hear in the pieces much of my original inspiration, and vividly remember exactly who I was at that moment in my life. That, for me, is a kind of spiritual time travel. It seems that it is also so for many of my colleagues who have known me for 50 years or so. They can still spot turns of phrases in the music that they say remind them of exactly who I was all those years ago, and what I have meant to them. Nothing could make me happier!”

This substantial collection spans music composed between the mid-1980s and early 2020s. There’s ample room on the album for wit and humor, the province of Symphony Cowgirl, the bar band interludes from Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind, the dancing-dog rhythms of Lope, and the song “Grace,” written as a 70th-birthday tribute for his friend Leonard Bernstein. Its tracklist embraces tender beauty in the spellbinding Notturno for flute and orchestra and Poems of Emily Dickinson, opens to the optimism that overcomes darkness in From the Diary of Anne Frank, and evokes memories of first dates, old friends, and lasting love in Upon Further Reflection.

Composition came naturally to Michael Tilson Thomas. His father, Ted, encouraged his only child to invent music at the keyboard; he later absorbed lessons from Ingolf Dahl, one of many German Jewish musicians who found refuge from Nazi persecution in Southern California. Writing music became a private passion, the necessary complement to his meteoric rise as conductor in the 1970s and beyond. What persuaded him to introduce his works to the public?

“My music was influenced by the encouragement of my many lifetime colleagues who simply insisted that I complete more pieces, in many cases, for them,” he replies. “They would not take ‘no’ for an answer. They kept bugging me until the pieces were done, tried out, revised and then out there on their own. My colleagues always expressed to me that there was a haunted quality in the music that they liked. They found themselves singing the tunes and some of the descant lines as they were driving in their cars or going for a walk. What could be better than that?”

Leonard Bernstein, notes Tilson Thomas, “was very encouraging to me about my writing.” He also pushed him to shout about his music to orchestra managers and concert promoters. “Bernstein wanted me to become much more compulsive and/or insistent about the works being played and about more people getting to know them. He had a way of expressing this with his customary tenderness and vulgarity that I find impossible to describe at this moment.”

The act of creating music remains a source of joy for MTT. It belongs to what he describes as the endless process of artistic rebirth and growth. “Over the course of my life, composition has helped me to stay in touch with my initial joy of making music,” he reflects. “It has also helped me to appreciate the initial inspirations of so many different composers, and be aware of the various steps and directions they went in their compositions. This, I think, has helped me to project their intentions—to share their intentions with a wide audience.”

Personal connections and lines of influence run deep in Tilson Thomas’ music. His experience as accompanist to the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan registers in Sentimental Again, which he dedicated to her, while his paternal Thomashefsky family’s shaping role in the story of American Yiddish theater is reflected in the vibrant melodic fabric of Meditations on Rilke. Agnegram and Symphony Cowgirl were conceived as gifts for long-time patrons of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Yuja Wang’s virtuosity the inspiration for “You Come Here Often?” from Upon Further Reflection.

“My perception of life, my perception of music, is a series of continua,” he comments. “They do influence one another and flow into one another in surprising ways that I can't predict, but I always find delightful. A lot of my music is a reflection of that experience. Sometimes the influences are obvious. I've even drawn attention to them, such as in Island Music, which suggests my love and familiarity with gamelan music as well as music of several different Caribbean islands. These musics flow and even superimpose themselves upon one another in my memories and whatever music I'm writing. Somewhere along the way the cultures of those islands, or of other musical worlds that so fascinate me, like 17th-century Venice, are bound to creep in somewhere.”

Inside the Album Booklet
There is an extensive essay on Michael Tilson Thomas by Larry Rothe, plus an affectionate tribute from fellow composer John Adams and fascinating notes on the music by MTT himself. You can follow all the texts, too, and there’s a timeline charting the life of Tilson Thomas, complete with wonderful, often intimate photographs from throughout his life.

Album booklets are available in version 2.0 of Apple Music Classical, which you can download now and enjoy as part of your Apple Music subscription. To access booklets, tap on the book icon at the top of your screen.