Leonard Bernstein Quotes

This month is Leonard Bernstein Month. As I've been learning about Bernstein's life and work, I have been really struck with his intelligence and the broad range of his interests. The first book I read was Dinner With Lenny: The Last Long Interview with Leonard Bernstein by Jonathan Cott. This interview took place just a year before Bernstein died. It's interesting to read this interview and think about Bernstein's successful life and all that he was able to learn and ponder in the process. Here are some quotes by Bernstein from this interview that I especially like:

• [Bernstein reminded the interviewer that the word "education" is related to the Latin "educere" - "to bring forth what is within"]. Then Bernstein added, "Though I can't prove it, deep in my heart I know that every person is born with the love of learning. Without exception, every infant studies its toes and fingers, and a child's discovery of his or her voice must be one of the most extraordinary of life's moments." (Dinner With Lenny, p. 17).

• "Part of the artifice of art is knowing how to steal classy." (Bernstein's response to the interviewer's reference to Picasso's statement that "good artists copy and great ones steal," p. 34).

• "Anything of a serious nature isn't 'instant' - you can't 'do' the Sistine Chapel in one hour...you have to life on your back and look up at that ceiling and contemplate" (p. 63, 66).

• "I love learning, I'm an eternal student, and that's maybe why I'm a pretty good teacher" (p. 75).

• "Advise students [of conducting] to look at the score and make it come alive as if they were the composer. If you can do that, you're a conductor...and if you can't, you're not" (p. 122).

I'm currently reading The Joy of Music by Bernstein (and following select chapters as I watch television broadcasts in the Leonard Bernstein Omnibus collection). Here are two quotes that I especially like:

• "Music...exists in the medium of time. It is time itself that must be carved up, molded and remolded until it becomes, like a statue, an existing shape and form. . . So the conductor is a kind of sculptor whose element is time instead of marble; and in sculpting it, he must have a superior sense of proportion and relationship" (The Joy of Music, p. 148-149).

• "...of all the different instruments in this vast, heterogeneous collection called an orchestra, there is none that can compete in any way with the sublime expressivity of the human voice. It is the greatest instrument there is; and when such a voice, or several, or many together, carry the weight of a drama, of a story line, of an emotional situation, then there is nothing in all theater to compare with it for sheer immediacy of impact" (The Joy of Music, p. 271).

Finally, I also want to note a few more great Bernstein quotes that I have come across online and elsewhere:

• "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." (This one is outside of my choir director's office door.) 

• "Music . . . can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable."