Leonard Bernstein - Meaning Quotes

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A work of art does not answer questions: it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between their contradictory answers.

Leonard Bernstein

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.

Leonard Bernstein

Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning... except its own, a meaning in musical terms, not in terms of words.

Leonard Bernstein