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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
Answers
Contradictory
Art
Provoking
Doe
Tension
Work
Essential
Essentials
Questions
Answer
Meaning
Provokes
More quotes by Leonard Bernstein
Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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
From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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
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
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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
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
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
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Leonard Bernstein
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
Leonard Bernstein
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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
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
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
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
