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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
Radical
Radicals
Avoid
Preceded
Music
Composers
Self
Experimental
Writing
Recognizing
Even
Composer
Trying
Precisely
Revolutionary
Styled

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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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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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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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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've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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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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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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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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