"The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle."
Read quote
25 likes
Quote collection
Leonard Bernstein quotes (page 2 of 3)
60 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes."
Read quote
25 likes
"From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining."
Read quote
22 likes
"Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable."
Read quote
22 likes
"I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer."
Read quote
21 likes
"When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer."
Read quote
21 likes
"Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace."
Read quote
20 likes
"We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind."
Read quote
19 likes
"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."
Read quote
18 likes
"Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own."
Read quote
18 likes
"Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it."
Read quote
17 likes
"I believe that man's noblest endowment is his capacity to change."
Read quote
17 likes
"Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors."
Read quote
14 likes
"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."
Read quote
14 likes
"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."
Read quote
13 likes
"It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once."
Read quote
12 likes
"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."
Read quote
12 likes
"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."
Read quote
12 likes
"Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune."
Read quote
12 likes
"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."
Read quote
11 likes