A Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music in something like Schubert or Bach because the further back you go, the less bells and whistles there are.
It took a while of performing and pushing the boundaries and starting to involve the audience to feel comfortable.
If people want bells and whistles and all of that, there are bells and whistles available. If they don't want bells and whistles there are places to go where they are not available.
I have a lot of friends who were stand-ups, and they just stopped after a while, because they didn't like that battle, or they just couldn't do it. And then they would get on a sitcom and get visible and get back into it, because the audience was just way easier on them. But they lost those crucial years of learning to turn any audience into your audience.
I think you have to do the stories that interest you and hope an audience likes it, rather than doing stories that you think the audience will like, whether you like them or not. I think there has to be something that you find compelling and interesting, and then hopefully an audience will agree with you.
The action genre is kind of designed for a young male audience. But we found on 'The Matrix' that we hit the Valhalla of movie making, which is the four quadrant audience - the young male audience, the older male audience, the young female audience and the older female audience.
Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.
The average age of the Jazz audience is increasing rapidly. Rapidly enough to suggest that there is no replacement among young people. Young people aren't starting to listen to Jazz and carrying it along in their lives with them. Jazz is becoming more like Classical music in terms of its relationship to the audience. And just a Classical music is grappling with the problem of audience development, so is Jazz grappling with this problem. I believe, deeply that Jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say to ordinary people. But it has to be systematic about getting out the message.
Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender. It takes you probably five to six minutes to build trust with an audience. A musical you can build trust in three notes. Boom, boom, boom, you're instantly seduced. So musicals have this easy potency, but generally, in my opinion, they waste them, because a musical is incredibly hard to do.
Emotionally, light very much influences, I feel, the audience. It's not something that most audience members are conscious of, which is a good thing, because it means as filmmakers, we have the opportunity to gently control an audience into feeling a certain way.
Pilots are so hard because you have to introduce all these characters, you have to hook an audience, and an audience has such a smaller attention span than maybe they used to have.
I have no interest in making music solely for a white audience. If that's what our audience is, I don't really feel responsible for that.
Regarding pushing the form, ideas interest me more than form. I think you can write a very subversive play in a three-act structure. The content makes the play. I feel the form is simply dressing, because ultimately, you want to communicate to the audience, and sometimes the best way to do that is to present a provocative idea in a format that is comfortable for them to receive. Then the idea will come through directly, right in solar plexus. After all, I want to make a living as an artist, and that means speaking to the audience in a form they can understand.
The one thing that I love about the live audience is the energy level. Like, from the minute of cast introductions, it's just constant energy being traded back and forth. When you do something funny, the audience laughs; when you're being serious, you can, like, feel the tension going through the audience.
Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.
Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.
The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience.
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