Quote

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
Academic
Total
Contact
Embrace
Music
Without
Life
Unthinkable

More quotes by 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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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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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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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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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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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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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard Bernstein
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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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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.
Leonard Bernstein