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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 BernsteinYoung People's Concerts: 'What Does Music Mean?', CBS television, 18 January 1958
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Leonard BernsteinThe Infinite Variety of Music, p. 69, 1966
Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.
Leonard BernsteinThe Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, p. 140, 1976
I can't live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it, or thinking about it.
Leonard BernsteinThe Infinite Variety of Music, p. 10, 1966
After the assassination of President Kennedy
This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard BernsteinSpeech after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 25 November 1963; in Findings (1982)
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Leonard BernsteinThe Infinite Variety of Music, p. 141, 1966