Michael Tilson Thomas

The United States has some of the world’s great symphony orchestras, and yet for some reason those orchestras rarely have hired American conductors. 

After Leonard Bernstein, there was Leonard Slatkin, then Michael Tilson Thomas (known today as MTT) but not many others. Recently, for example, the Chicago Symphony hired the Norwegian Klaus Makela, and his predecessor was the Italian Ricardo Muti, with a string of other Europeans preceding them. 

It’s hard to know the reason, but in the case of MTT I briefly had a chance to observe him up close and have followed his career since. 

I started my college career as a trumpet major at the University of Southern California, whose faculty included violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. My roommate, a clarinetist named Ed Fiorito, was a friend of MTT (who in those days we simply called Mike), and frequently a group of us would gather in our dorm room, listen to records, and comment on them. Guess whose comments were the best, smartest, and most profound.

At age 19, MTT was named music director of L.A.’s Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, followed ultimately by positions with the symphony orchestras of Boston, Buffalo, London, and, for nearly thirty years, San Francisco. He also founded the New World Symphony in Miami Beach.

Owing to health concerns, MTT recently cut back appearances, but later this year I’ll be traveling to Lincoln Center to see his upcoming performance with the New York Philharmonic. 

Having seen MTT up close and at a distance, I return to my original question: Why are there so few American conductors at his level? 

Genius helps, but MTT isn’t the only American musician with that quality. He has an abiding love for our music, including that of Ives, Copland, Ruggles, Cage, Dahl, and Gershwin, but his favorite composer is probably the Austrian Mahler. Musicianship learned from the USC faculty masters didn’t hurt.

I suppose that, in the end, it’s a mystery, as well as a persistent question for American orchestras. In the meantime, maybe all we really can do is appreciate big-hearted musicians such as MTT and look for the young Americans who will follow.