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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in 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
Mozart
Escaping
Contained
Frame
Constantly
Cannot
Music

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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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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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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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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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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, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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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