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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?

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
Jewish
Roots
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More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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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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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
Leonard Bernstein