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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
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Orchestra
Composer
Interested
Sound

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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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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.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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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 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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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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