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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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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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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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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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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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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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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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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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same 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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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