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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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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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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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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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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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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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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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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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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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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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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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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
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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.
Leonard Bernstein
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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