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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.

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
Great
Plan
Things
Plans
Time
Humor
Needed
Achieve
Quite
Composer
Two
Stress
Enough
Achievement

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Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
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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.
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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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.
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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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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.
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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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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.
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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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