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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.

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
Conducting
Hundred
Making
Time
Love
Like
People

More quotes by Leonard Bernstein

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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
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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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I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
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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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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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Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
Leonard Bernstein
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...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.
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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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This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
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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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