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
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.
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
...we can all shut-up and go back to our caves.