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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
Composer
Tunes
Tone
Takes
Write
Writing
Asshole
Tune

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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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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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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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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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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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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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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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
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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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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in 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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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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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