Quote

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

Leonard Bernstein

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Write
Writing
Asshole
Tune
Composer
Tunes
Tone
Takes

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

Image
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
Leonard Bernstein
Image
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
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.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard Bernstein
Image
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
Image
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Leonard Bernstein