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

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
Asshole
Tune
Composer
Tunes
Tone
Takes
Write

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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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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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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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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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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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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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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
Leonard Bernstein
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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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Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Leonard Bernstein