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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
Without
Life
Unthinkable
Academic
Total
Contact
Embrace
Music

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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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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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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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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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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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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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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