During a 2012 interview for The Guardian, Michael Tilson Thomas said "The most important thing about music is what happens when it stops, what remains with the listener, what they take away."
While the abiding resonance of music might have been of paramount importance to the famed conductor — who died Wednesday at age 81 after more than four years battling an aggressive form of brain cancer — there’s little doubt that his charisma served him in good stead at the podium.
Apart from his spirited conducting style, there was that impish smile — which remained undimmed from his conservatory days to his final ones.
Also, a mischievous sense of humor: in the fall of 2013, while leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, the concert was bedeviled by coughing from the audience. Tilson Thomas — whom fans affectionately call “MTT” — went backstage and emerged with some throat lozenges, which he tossed underhand into the house. The audience responded with applause and laughter.
While mentoring the first incarnation of the New World Symphony, the Miami Beach orchestral academy he co-founded, Tilson Thomas would reportedly read passages of Goethe to the young student musicians just for “context.”
READ MORE: Ailing Tilson Thomas to conduct New World Symphony for two last concerts
One thing’s for sure: by the composer's pen or the conductor's baton, in the classroom or the concert hall, Michael Tilson Thomas wanted to change people’s lives through music.
For decades, Tilson Thomas divided his time between San Francisco — where he served as Music Director of the city's Symphony for 25 years — and Miami Beach.
In 1987, a discussion with Carnival Cruise Line founder Ted Arison, who shared the maestro's determination to support young artists, led to the creation of the New World Symphony (NWS).
NWS's original home was the Gusman Cultural Center (now the Olympia Theater) in downtown Miami, where the Symphony held its inaugural concert on Feb. 4, 1988. NWS subsequently moved into the Lincoln Theatre on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach in 1989.
In a 2019 interview with WLRN, Tilson Thomas told us about his original vision for the conservatory program.
"It was an amazing adventure, because I had had a dream for a very long time of there being a place where young musicians could do some of their most creative work," he said.
"And really work that focused on their becoming who they needed to be, as opposed to fulfilling the expectations of some curriculum or another. A very crucial time in their young lives, to get out of conservatory or college and say: 'Now what?'"
Tilson Thomas's next step in realizing his dream was the 2011 opening of the New World Center, designed by his long-time friend, architect Frank Gehry.
Located in the heart of South Beach, the building's centerpiece is its 756-seat auditorium — featuring acoustic panels shaped like giant sails that double as projection screens for live performances.
Outside, in the adjacent SoundScape Park, audiences can experience The New World Center’s free WALLCAST® concerts, where performances from inside the concert hall are broadcast on a 7,000-square-foot projection wall.
During the New World Center's grand opening celebration in January 2011, WLRN asked Tilson Thomas what role the New World Center would ultimately play in the music world.
He replied that classical music is an unbroken tradition whose "center spirit" has remained constant for over 1,000 years.
"It's dealt with different nationalities and different social movements," he said. "It is continuing to absorb all these influences and develop into something new and powerful. And we think this building will be part of that process."
The New World Symphony says that since its founding in 1987, it has helped launch the careers of over 1,300 musicians worldwide.
