Daily.

It's essential that schools present a wide music program, not because it increases math test scores, but because it does something to people's souls. It gives them a kind of focus, a kind of tranquility that they need to center their lives and at the same time, families must also be a part of this. Anyone who has music in his life probably had some experience of it through his family and I understand that it's intimidating for parents to think, "Oh, my Gosh. How am I ever going to present this whole huge corpus of music, or arts, or whatever to my child?" But it can be done by just doing a little bit at a time. I mean, I was hearing music in my house a lot, but my parents also did things like before dinner, we would spend five minutes looking at the work of some artist, like Velazquez, or El Greco, or Murillo … I'm mentioning all Spanish ones now, but we had a little book that we got from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which just had pages describing pictures and the artists and then had a big sheet of postage stamps of those pictures that I could then cut out the right picture and paste it with the right description and it was just a kind of little five-minute thing that we did before dinner. But it meant that by the time I was 12-years-old, I could go to a museums and say, "Oh, yeah. That's a Utrillo. That's an early Picasso. That's a Monet. That's a whatever." It just was natural. I just knew it and was excited to see more work by those artists. In a way, this goes back to what you were asking me about the website that I think the issue is not so much concerts. Concerts are wonderful and important and people get a great energy and revivification from concerts because we do have this experience of wanting as people to share together great words, great music, great art. But I think it's more important, the experience of these great arts in people's daily lives. So by having this website, I'm hoping to make it attractive enough eventually that people say, "Oh, let's take a five-minute break." I'm in my office. I want to take a five-minute break. I'll go to this place on the website and some kind of shuffle throughout the centuries format. It'll play me something amazing that I never new existed that I'll think, "Oh, that's such an insight. That's a gorgeous thirteenth century love song or that's a fantastic diverting dance from some other country, in some other century," and get people to have that kind of spontaneous moment-by-moment reaction to the arts. Because if it's in your daily life, then it becomes an ongoing way at the way you think about life, the way you think about people, the way you think about yourself.

Michael Tilson Thomas

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The San Francisco Symphony's Keeping Score.

MTT on creativity.

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