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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
Like
Orchestra
Composer
Interested
Sound

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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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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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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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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.
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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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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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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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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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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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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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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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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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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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A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Leonard Bernstein
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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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