Biography
Tilson Thomas was born in Los Angeles, California to Ted and Roberta Thomas, a Broadway stage manager and a middle school history teacher respectively. He is the grandson of noted Yiddish theater stars Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky. Tilson Thomas studied at the University of Southern California, studying piano with John Crown and composition and conducting under Ingolf Dahl. As a student of Friedelind Wagner, Tilson Thomas was a Musical Assistant and Assistant Conductor at the Bayreuth Festival.
Tilson Thomas is openly gay and lives in San Francisco with his partner of thirty years, Joshua Robison.
Read more about this topic: Michael Tilson Thomas
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
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