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. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
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.
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.
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.
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
Life without music is unthinkable.
If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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.
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.
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.