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

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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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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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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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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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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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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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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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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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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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