Leonard Bernstein - Music Quotes

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Music…can name the unnameable, and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Leonard Bernstein
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it.

Leonard Bernstein
Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?

Leonard Bernstein
Poetry and music—but especially music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers—can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.

Leonard Bernstein
I believe that from the earth emerges a musical poetry that 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, and is known as the harmonic series.

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
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.

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

Leonard Bernstein