MTT’s Juilliard Commencement Speech

On Friday, May 20, 2022, Michael Tilson Thomas gave the commencement address at The Juilliard School’s Commencement Ceremony. In addition to speaking, he was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate and led a student ensemble in Ingolf Dahl’s Intermezzo and Fugue from Music for Brass Instruments. Below is a transcript of his speech:

Hello Juilliard Class of 2022! You did it! Bravo!

Chairman Kovner, President Woetzel, Provost Meyer, distinguished honorees, the Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, and families, thank you for inviting me – it’s great to be here.

Most of all, I salute you graduates. We’re so proud of you and your achievement. You may not realize how important, how moving it is, for us veteran artists to experience your dedication and accomplishment. There are moments in life when everyone questions what it was all for. Were our life choices right? Were they worth it? Your commitment and dedication makes us feel that our choices have been valid.

For I believe there are two key times in an artist’s life. The first is inventing yourself. The second is going the distance. Your years here at Juilliard have been a part of that inventing yourself time. And now you are going on to the second, perhaps the harder part, going the distance – how do you sustain the vision, make it grow, and share it? Both the invention of yourself and going the distance can take many forms. To be an artist means to have the courage for rebirth and growth. And it’s never over.

As I think over my own years of learning, which are still very much going on, I think of some essential moments and of the essential people who helped me on my way. I was an only child growing up in Los Angeles in a show business family. Everyone in my family was musical, but they were not trained musicians. They could all play by ear and improvise and come up with a fresh new song to go into a show whose curtain was going up in a couple of hours. I believe that my most important music teacher was my father. He had an incredible ear for music, for understanding its essential meaning, even though he was significantly hard of hearing.

My parents made sure that I had musical experiences as a kid. They sent me to a very creative Lefty pre-school. Music was an essential part of our weekly activities. A woman came in and played music for us and we would dance around, banging out the rhythms of the music on sticks or whatever was available. She played medleys of different kinds of songs, starting with a march and suddenly changing to a waltz or a jig. I remember that I instantly knew when she had changed from one meter to another and that not all of my classmates did so. I made it my responsibility to run around the classroom offering advice and demonstrating just what meter we were really in. I think this was the beginning of my conducting career! So why did I correct my fellow students? I wanted them to experience the joy and surprise I felt at the exact moment when it was happening.

Meanwhile, at home, I was playing everything by ear, following in my father’s footsteps. At around age ten my parents decided that unless I learned to read music right away, I would never be comfortable with it. They enrolled me in USC’s freshly created Preparatory Music School. In later years this became the Colburn School. I had to audition. By some miracle, Dorothy Bishop, the visionary head of the department, accepted me. What was my first audition like? I played Gershwin the way my dad played it, the way “he had heard Gershwin play it.” I played some Bach with improvisatory “improvements” whenever I couldn’t remember exactly how it was supposed to go.

Over the next couple of years, Miss Bishop brought some order and discipline into my music making – without breaking my spirit. She kept it free and imaginative. She enrolled me in a keyboard harmony class. Once a week a group of kids gathered in an old army barracks on campus to play on broken down upright pianos arranged in a circle. I remember the remarkable diversity of students in that class. Many of them had prowess in one musical style or another that reflected their family backgrounds. A few had real insight and were original. Who these original people were had nothing to do with their age, race, gender or origins. They were simply original. And that was obvious and inspiring.

A year or two after this I took up oboe which allowed me to play in an orchestra and make music with other young musicians who were at or beyond my own level of accomplishment. I remember the thrill of being in an orchestra that was good enough to sight read a piece and have it be recognizable. It was magical. I took great delight in hearing my young colleagues playing something wonderfully and memorably. It was transporting. I’ve tried to keep hold of that enthusiasm for my work and for my colleagues’ work.

Through the preparatory school, little by little, I began to make contact with senior faculty at USC. Much of the faculty were, as were many Los Angeles musicians at that time, refugees who had fled from Europe, especially from Russia and Austria; people like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Heifetz and Piatigorsky. Many of my teachers came from the circles that surrounded these iconic masters. Thanks to them I had opportunities to attend and participate in their master classes. This was the period I like to call “The Parade of Accents.” As much as I love doing these accents, I won’t go off course now by doing them all. I’ll share just one of them. It’s the voice of one of my piano teachers and baroque music advisors. Her name was Alice Ehlers.

Madame Ehlers, as we called her, had fled Austria, just before the Nazi takeover. She had been a super talented, smart and vivacious young Jewish Viennese girl. She had been trained by the most sophisticated musicians in Vienna and mingled in groups with people like Richard Strauss and Alban Berg. Her main instrument was the harpsichord, an instrument I had always wanted to play. She generously agreed to teach me for a summer course of six weeks.

When we first met I was about 14 and she was in her 80’s. At our first meeting she said something like:

 

“So young man. I hear you want to play the harpsichord. And I hear you love Bach. That’s very good. For the moment, let’s forget about the harpsichord, which is a very quirky and unruly instrument. Let’s just concentrate on Bach and on music. Please at your next lesson play for me, Bach’s ‘C minor Partita’.”

Trust me, I am not in any way exaggerating her accent.

Then she said:

“Dear, perhaps you can help me. I am old. Modern life confuses me. Tell me, when you put the needle on the record, do you put it on the outside or the inside?”

That she couldn’t remember. But she could remember every twist and turn of “The Well Tempered Clavier” – no problem.

Imagining myself to be some kind of hotshot, I came into my next lesson prepared to play three movements of the Bach partita. It didn’t turn out that way. In that first lesson we perhaps made it to bar 17. She had something very specific to say about each moment and was totally focused and very critical of everything that I was doing. After a few lessons we had made it to about a third of the way through the first movement.

One day, as I was playing, she reached over, and with her octogenarian vice like grip, pulled my right hand off of the keyboard, held it, looked into my eyes and said:

“Dear dear. Why do you always do such stupid things.’

I said:

“But Madame. At the last lesson you told me to do this.”

She replied:

“I tell you to do something? Nonsense. I would never tell you anything to do. In fact, it doesn’t concern me in any way what you do or what you do not do. I only point out to you that in the music there are designs. And concerning these designs you must make decisions…there are consequences to your decisions!”

That was a revelatory moment for me. It was my first real experience of “tough love.” In general, the greater the talent, the tougher the love needs to be.

I eventually attended the USC school of music. In my second year of graduate school I was hired by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to be the Assistant Conductor and pianist of the orchestra. William Steinberg was the Music Director and my boss. Steinberg was an important conductor of the old German/Austrian tradition. He followed in the footsteps of Mahler and Klemperer. Steinberg, like Madame Ehlers, had a sometimes gruff, tough-love demeanor. He actually couldn’t have been more devoted to music and, at times, was wickedly charming.

He once assigned me to play a florid keyboard part in an early piece by Haydn. The day before the first orchestra rehearsal he said,

“So, young sir. You will come to my dressing room later today and you will play me your continuo part and we will see how it’s going.”

I later came to his dressing room and played. He said,

“Well, young sir. Very pretty. Very charming. So, at tomorrow morning’s orchestra rehearsal we will see how it goes on ‘the field.’ And let us hope it will be the ‘playing field’ and not the ‘battlefield.’ ”

Three months into my first season, during a concert in what was then called Philharmonic Hall here in Lincoln Center, Steinberg walked off stage after the first half, pointed to me and said:

“Young man. Put on your suit. You’re conducting the rest of the concert”

I froze. He said:

“What, you’re still here. Didn’t you understand me? Get dressed. You’re conducting in 20 minutes.”

Because of Steinberg’s continued illness, I conducted 40 concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra that first season. I was 24. I relied a great deal on what I had learned from my teachers and I also took chances. It was my devotion to my craft, my enthusiasm and the belief in me from the veteran members of the orchestra that allowed me to jump into the unknown and set me off to go the distance.

I believe that finding your unique path involves treasuring and sharing your roots. You have a lifetime to explore and to share your heritage with all of us. It’s important. I’m a second generation American. My roots are Jewish Ukrainian. My family fled the Ukraine in the 1880s. They settled in New York. My father’s parents, Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, invented themselves as actors. They were founders of the Yiddish Theater in America, which was a very big deal in New York 100 years ago. They became superstars. They owned theaters and publishing companies. Lots of young people who later became Broadway and film legends, got their start in and around my grandparents theaters. George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin hung around their theaters and at my Grandparent’s house. George Gershwin gave my eight year old father his first pointers on piano playing. So I grew up in a family of self taught actors and musicians.

My grandfather, Boris, passed away before I was born. But I was close to my very theatrical Grandmother, Bessie, who lived near us in Los Angeles. She was definitely one of my teachers. I learned so much from her about timing, projection, humor, and being a producer. Celebrating my family’s theatrical heritage was a significant part of my childhood.

I think my theatrical background was one of the reasons Leonard Bernstein and I got along so well. Of course, we could talk endlessly about classical music. But we also relished our arcane knowledge of forgotten songs of Broadway, recalling great actors, dancers and directors from the past and present, and exploring jazz and blues. We enjoyed comparing performances of classic songs like “Careless Love” by Bessie Smith, Joe Turner, Big Mama Thornton or Ray Charles. Our verbal rambles were tinged with show biz snappy patter in English and Yiddish. We both realized how much we loved artists in all genres. He was thrilled, no less than I was, when I started performing with Sarah Vaughan. I learned so much from her.

I have a special place in my heart for dancers and have treasured my collaboration with artists like Pina Bausch or Mikhail Baryshnikov. I have huge admiration and respect for Jacques D’Amboise. We lost him this past year, at age 86. What a force. He joined the New York City Ballet in 1949, was named a principal dancer in 1953, and he danced 24 roles for George Balanchine, and choreographed 17 ballets for the company. He founded the National Dance Institute in 1976 to promote dance for children as of 2021 the program has reached two million children. He’s for sure an artist who went the distance.

It was clear that what Jaques did was borne of his desire to create a community of understanding. That’s something I’ve always believed. For me, the most profound question is what happens after the performance. What’s left when the music stops, when the curtain falls and the lights go off? What do people take away with them? What did we, as artists, do to make the souls of our audience richer, fuller and more compassionate?

I believe very much in the power of the arts to unify people and to transform them – and even save people’s souls. There are many lost souls in our society now – people who are husks surrounding emptiness and anger. These thoughts have sadly been much my mind since the news last week of the hate/race driven murders in Buffalo. I feel such profound grief for the victims and their families. Looking into the eyes of the eighteen-year old who is said to have committed this atrocity, I see such suspicion, such a chilling vacancy. How did this troubled young man get so far off on the wrong track? The question I ask myself, and I ask you, is, was there a moment when the arts could have assuaged his anger and changed the course of his life. I hope so. I’ve always believed so.

I realize that I’ve had a very fortunate and, in many ways, a privileged life. My generation, my community, grew up in a time of peace and prosperity. It was a time of the decades-long victory party the United States and its allies threw for themselves after the Second World War. Anything seemed possible. My personal anxieties came from realizing, and only very gradually accepting, that I was gay. I felt I couldn’t say anything about it. Just when I thought I was getting past hiding it, I started to become a public personality and the confusion resurfaced in new and painful ways. In those days, much of the world of classical music was a labyrinth of sliding panels of secrecy. It was too big to take on all at once. So the problem lingered. I resolved to become the best artist I could be and plant my feet as a man on the incontestable excellence of my work. That’s pretty much what I did. I shared my art as generously as possible wherever I went. Along the way there were kind moments of shared understanding. Interestingly, some members of orchestras were perceptive and kind. When I was still quite young, a veteran section leader of the Chicago Symphony once asked me:

“Hey kid. What’s your story? We think we got it; Jewish, Russian and we think we got all the rest of it too. Just letting you know it’s all OK. Let’s make more music.”

That was a pretty great moment. It happened because we had the opportunity to get to know one another through music making. By the time I was appointed Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony the whole city welcomed me and my husband, Joshua, as perhaps the first out gay couple in a leadership role in an American orchestra. It was wonderful. Everyone should have the opportunity to express themselves openly and with confidence. I call on you to cherish, protect, and grow all aspects of inclusion. Take nothing for granted. The quest for equality is never ending.

It’s sensational that you’ve completed your studies and that you are graduating. Now is the time for you to commit to a lifetime of fine tuning your personal relationship to your art and your dedication to society. Your generation is going to be called upon, as perhaps no other since those who graduated in the 1930s, to examine and question the role and purpose of the arts in a society. Back in the day this question was asked by many people you know about, like Martha Graham, Leonard Bernstein, Langston Hughes and Aaron Copland. When they were your age they sat up all night trying to come up with answers that might work for them and their generation. The question they came back to again and again was what, in such a challenged society, is the responsibility of an artist. My generation dived into it in the 1960s. Now you are going to have to find answers to that same question that work for you. I really hope you can. The arts are under attack by those who want to merchandize it, to chain it to technology and take it as far away as possible from the heart to heart origins that make it both personal and universal. The issue with the arts has always been, and I hope always will be, content. Not production, not distribution, not schmooze, not glitz.

These days, I’m looking anew at what it means for me to go the distance. I was recently diagnosed with Glioblastoma, a fatal brain tumor. I am considering how best to get back to what I love and to communicate my most sincere thoughts in whatever time I have left. I returned to the stage with the New York Philharmonic in November. It was a joyous experience. The musicians greeted me so warmly and all at once we were together back in the space of making music. Even old Beethoven came alive again in some new ways. Our purpose was clear. Even though I was feeling physically uncertain, my years of training had created a vast reserve that, in that moment, completely supported me. As I regain my footing I realize even more that compassion must be my companion. I hope it is also yours.

I find I’m assigning myself the same questions about life that I ask my students about each new piece we take up. The questions are:

What is happening?
Why is it happening?
What does this really mean to me? What am I going to do about it?

As you go forward, I urge you to keep thinking about these questions, to keep exploring your roots, to continue celebrating your heritage, and to absorbing the awareness of the many other traditions you have learned about here. I want to encourage you to fiercely keep hold of your sense of wonder, your commitment to excellence, your sense of humor and your enthusiasm for your work and for other people’s work. Whoever can keep hold of these convictions over a lifelong career is the big winner. For what’s at stake is a humanitarian tradition existing for over a thousand years. It has sustained people, given them comfort and courage and led them back to a way to celebrate and rejoice.

When I look at you brilliant and caring people, I believe again in the ideals I learned from my teachers, that I still hold dear. I know that these ideals will, in you, find worthy champions. Treasure your teachers. Become teachers yourselves! Seeing you, seeing the light in your eyes, I know there is hope. I know there is a future. Your sincerity, your devotion, your authenticity will make it so.

Go the distance. The world needs you. Congratulations.