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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.
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
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Provokes
Answers
Contradictory
Art
Provoking
Doe
Tension
Work
Essential
Essentials
Questions
More quotes by Leonard Bernstein
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in 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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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
Leonard Bernstein
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
Leonard Bernstein
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
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.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
Leonard Bernstein
