A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
Success is all very well as long as you don’t inhale.
I have two answers to everything and one answer to nothing.
To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I’m both.
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years.
When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
Life without music is meaningless, music without life is academic.
It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.
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.
From New Year’s on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
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.
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?
Which of my Jewish roots do I follow?
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
I believe that man’s noblest endowment is his capacity to change.
The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.
The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed... because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events... by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.
There are two ways to think about all this. One way is that life is absurd to start with and that only a mad man goes out and tries to change the world, to fight for good and against evil. The other way is that life is indeed absurd to start with and that it can be given meaning only if you live it for your ideals, visions and poetic truths, and despite all the skepticism of all the Sancho Panzas’ in the world, saddle up whatever worn out horse you’ve got and go after those visions.
Two things are necessary for great achievement: a plan and not quite enough time.