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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
Questions
Answer
Meaning
Provokes
Answers
Contradictory
Art
Provoking
Doe
Tension
Work
Essential
Essentials

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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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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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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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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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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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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.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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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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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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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