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
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.
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
Life without music is unthinkable.
If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.
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.
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.