Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernsteinwas an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the US to receive worldwide acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth25 August 1918
CityLawrence, MA
CountryUnited States of America
Leonard Bernstein quotes about
Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
It was an initiation into the love of learning, of learning how to learn . . . as a matter of interdisciplinary cognition - that is, learning to know something by its relation to something else.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.
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.
Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
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.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
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.
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it , studying it , or thinking about it .