Leonard Bernstein
Music is never about anything. Music just is. Music is notes, beautiful notes and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them, and that’s all there is to it.
– Leonard Bernstein, Young People's Concerts: 'What Does Music Mean?', CBS television, 18 January 1958
Themes: meaning, music, pleasure | Art form: Music
More quotes by Leonard Bernstein
- This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
- I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it.
- Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
- A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
- Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.