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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
Art
Provoking
Doe
Tension
Work
Essential
Essentials
Questions
Answer
Meaning
Provokes
Answers
Contradictory
More quotes by Leonard Bernstein
Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Leonard Bernstein
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
Leonard Bernstein
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
Leonard Bernstein
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.
Leonard Bernstein
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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.
Leonard Bernstein
Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
Leonard Bernstein
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
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
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
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
