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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.

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
Special
Region
Stars
Utterly
Art
Regions
Music
Stands
Without
Arts
Star
Except
Meaning
Unlit

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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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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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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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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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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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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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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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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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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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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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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've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Leonard Bernstein