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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.

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
Soul
Noble
Whole
Lips
Real
Honest
Trumpet
Even
Practice
Armstrong
Every
Simple
Trumpets
Men
Three
Louis
Time
True
Puts
Doe
Notes

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Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
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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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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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The joy of music should never be interrupted by a commercial.
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Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
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To achieve great things, two things are needed a plan, and not quite enough 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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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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Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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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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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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Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
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Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
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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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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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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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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