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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
Cannot
Music
Mozart
Escaping
Contained
Frame
Constantly

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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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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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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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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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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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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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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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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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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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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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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.
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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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