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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

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
Reaching
Powers
Communicate
Name
Names
Music
Unknowable
Metaphorical
Specific

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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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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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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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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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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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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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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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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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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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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