TED Speaker: Michael Tilson Thomas, "Music & Emotion Through Time"

I viewed a very interesting speech on TED.com by famous American conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas. The speech is entitled "Music and Emotion Through Time" and discusses how emotion in music has changed over time and also how music can affect people during different scenarios over their lifetime.

Thomas' deep love for music shines through during his speech and he admits that has a strong desire to continue to spread the musical word to others. He describes his father as his biggest teacher despite overcoming the adversity of needing a hearing aid and being a completely self-taught musician. Throughout his career Thomas's fascination has grown with how particular pieces of music enter people's lives and what meaning it carries from that point forward. He describes several instances during which he witnessed individuals recalling music that so clearly impacted them the first time they heard it. With this notion he explains that the tradition of music has made it something that is carried down through generations since the beginning of time. Thomas states that music has virtually become its own language through which we as human beings can express who we are. He says it is a language that consistently evolves.

Thomas moves on to discuss man's need to notate or "encode" music throughout time and how that has changed music's priority. He describes how classical music has changed through different centuries and how distinct genres of music have come to exist due to these changes. He also explains how the individual chords in music express different emotions and how their placement together can conjure evident changes in human emotion. He goes on to recognize how much technology played a part in these changes in music due to more expectations from composers and music. He questions, "Now that we have unlimited access to music, what does stick with us?"

For me, Thomas' speech was very inspiring and informative. I was aware of who Thomas was before viewing this speech, but I was not all that familiar with his research of music so listening to some of his findings was very insightful. I was interested in this speech in particular because I understand how much emotion is involved in music and how easily emotion can be provoked in individuals while they are listening to certain types of music. Thinking of how music is in present day while being reminded by Thomas of the highly important changes of classical music centuries ago, really made me ponder how much of a driving force emotion is in this art form.