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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
Names
Music
Unknowable
Metaphorical
Specific
Reaching
Powers
Communicate
Name

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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same 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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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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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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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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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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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 joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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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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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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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in 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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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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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