What happens when the music stops? Where does it go?

The world changes when there's music in it.

The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

The real deep text of music and the whole reason that it has continued with the profundity and urgency that it has for over a thousand years, has to do with what the notes say, what the notes witness, different experiences of hope or doubt that people are able to distill and encode and pass on in this way.

I have a strange situation as far as my name is concerned, because of course, what should my name really be? Is it my traditional Jewish name? Or this curious name my parents put together, partially to honor departed family members, and partially to keep me away from the absolute craziness of my grandparents' fame and the intrusiveness of their fans? So many people call me "MTT," and some do say, "Oh Maestro," and some are comfortable calling me Michael.

One of my central maxims is how a major part of what a conductor tries to do is get a large group of people to agree on where "now" actually is.

When I was a kid, three years old, I couldn't walk by the piano without reaching up and trying to play a few notes on it. There are kids who are just drawn to listening to music and dancing to it and trying to conduct.