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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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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
Life
Unthinkable
Academic
Total
Contact
Embrace
Music
Without

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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 asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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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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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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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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