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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
Specific
Reaching
Powers
Communicate
Name
Names
Music
Unknowable
Metaphorical

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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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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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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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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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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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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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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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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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Leonard Bernstein
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein