Best 31 quotes of Leonard Bernstein on MyQuotes

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.

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.

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.

I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.

I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

I hate you, Richard Wagner . . . but I hate you on my knees.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

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.

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.

It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.

Life without music is unthinkable.

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.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.

Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.

Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.

The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

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.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost.

When the thunder rumbles, Now the age of gold is dead. When the dreams we've clung to Trying to stay young, Have left us parched and old instead. When my courage crumbles, When I feel confused and frail, When my spirit falters on decaying altars And my illusions fail -- I go on right then. I go on again. I go on to say I will celebrate another day. I go on. If tomorrow tumbles And everything I love is gone, I will face regret all my days, and yet I will still go on.

Wine snobbery, of course, is part showmanship, part sophistication, part knowledge, and part bluff

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 are endowed with the powers of fantasy, the dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night - visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality thought that makes the difference - not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking. And our greatest thinkers, those who have radically changed our world, have always arrived at their truths by dreaming them; they are first fantasized, and only then subjected to proof.

The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.