Leonard Bernstein: Quotes about music

Leonard Bernstein was American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. Explore interesting quotes on music.
Leonard Bernstein: 34 quotes31 likes

“So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?”

Leonard Bernstein The Unanswered Question

The Unanswered Question (1976)
Context: 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?

“Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.”

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

The Cambridge Companion to Conducting p. 16.

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

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.”

Leonard Bernstein book The Joy of Music

Source: The Joy of Music