Quote

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

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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
Writing
Five
Fades
Something
Start
Heat
Energy
Rhythm
Spirit
Worried
Tightness
Doesn
Ten
Freezing
Certain
Minutes
Fade
Matter
Imagination
Energies
Take
Creative
Tense

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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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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.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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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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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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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