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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
Takes
Write
Writing
Asshole
Tune
Composer
Tunes
Tone

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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I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .
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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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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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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 achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough time.
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
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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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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
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From New Year's on the outlook brightens good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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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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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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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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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
Leonard Bernstein