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

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...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.
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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.
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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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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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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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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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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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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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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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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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