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
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.
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.
This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.
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.
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.
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.