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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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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
Orchestra
Composer
Interested
Sound
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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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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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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've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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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.
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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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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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Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.
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A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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