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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.

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
Believe
Source
Sources
Cause
Contemplation
Inspiration
Evolve
Causes
Musical
Known
Series
Harmonic
Nature
Universal
Tonal
Earth
Exist
Evolves
Music
Poetry
Emerges

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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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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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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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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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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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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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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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 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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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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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