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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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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
Even
Composer
Trying
Precisely
Revolutionary
Styled
Radical
Radicals
Avoid
Preceded
Music
Composers
Self
Experimental
Writing
Recognizing
More quotes by Leonard Bernstein
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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
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
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
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
Leonard Bernstein
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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
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
Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Leonard Bernstein
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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
Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Leonard Bernstein
The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
Leonard Bernstein
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
Leonard Bernstein
