The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there’s been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

Michael Tilson Thomas is describing his early programming strategy after taking up leadership of the San Francisco Symphony. In his first season(s), he intentionally placed at least one American work on every concert program and featured music by living composers. The remark reflects a common challenge for incoming music directors: establishing artistic identity while building credibility with an existing audience. By pairing contemporary and American repertoire with the orchestra’s core offerings, Tilson Thomas suggests he was cultivating a relationship of confidence—showing listeners that unfamiliar music would be presented thoughtfully and at a high level, so that over time they would follow him into broader repertoire choices.

The quote frames audience “trust” as something earned through consistent, visible artistic choices rather than through rhetoric. Tilson Thomas implies that programming is a form of leadership: by repeatedly including American and living composers, he normalizes the new and signals long-term commitment to a musical mission. The underlying idea is that audiences are more willing to take risks—listening to unfamiliar works, accepting interpretive departures, or embracing a conductor’s broader vision—when they sense coherence and integrity in a director’s decisions. Trust, here, is built incrementally through experience: each successful encounter with new music becomes evidence that the conductor’s guidance is reliable.