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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
Writing
Recognizing
Even
Composer
Trying
Precisely
Revolutionary
Styled
Radical
Radicals
Avoid
Preceded
Music
Composers
Self
Experimental
More quotes by Leonard Bernstein
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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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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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Leonard Bernstein
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Leonard Bernstein
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.
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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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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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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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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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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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
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein
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
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
