Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
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Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein ( BURN-styne; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was 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." His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, Peter Pan, Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On the Waterfront, his Mass, and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works. Bernstein was the first conductor to give a series of television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. He was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard. As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and critical success of West Side Story. 2Biography 3Early life He was born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Ukrainian-Jewish parents Jennie (née Resnick) and Samuel Joseph Bernstein, a hairdressing supplies wholesaler originating from Rovno (now Ukraine). His family spent their summers at their vacation home in Sharon, Massachusetts. His grandmother insisted that his first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, which they preferre
Tonight, tonight It all began tonight I saw you and the world went away
Only you, you’re the only thing I’ll see forever In my eyes, in my words and in everything I do Nothing else but you Ever
Always you, every thought I’ll ever know Everywhere I go, you’ll be
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
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…
There are two ways to think about all this. One way is that life is absurd to start with and that only a mad man goes out and tries to change the world, to fight for good and against evil. The other way is that life is indeed absurd to start with and that it can be given meaning only if you live it…
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another…and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
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…
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
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've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.
Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.