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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Leonard Bernstein

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Leonard Bernstein
Age: 72 †
Born: 1918
Born: August 25
Died: 1990
Died: October 14
Associate Professor
Composer
Conductor
Film Score Composer
Musicologist
Pianist
Lawrence
Massachusetts
Louis Bernstein
Violence
Humanity
Devotedly
Peace
Reply
Music
Beautifully
Ever
Intensely
Make
Composer
Jazz
Musical

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
Leonard Bernstein
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Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
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Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
Leonard Bernstein
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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
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The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another... and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
Leonard Bernstein
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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
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Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Leonard Bernstein
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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Leonard Bernstein
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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Leonard Bernstein
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What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.
Leonard Bernstein
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
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I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.
Leonard Bernstein
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Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great he is free from the experience of hostility he is a poet, and most like an angel.
Leonard Bernstein
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The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist it is a gift we all share to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
Leonard Bernstein
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You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over.
Leonard Bernstein