Quote of the Day (Leonard Bernstein, on Why Conducting Is ‘The Closest Thing I Know to Love’)

“The conductor must not only make his orchestra play, he must make them want to play. He must exalt them. Lift them. Start their adrenaline pouring. Either by pleading or demanding or raging — it doesn’t matter. It is not so much imposing his will on them like a dictator. It is more like projecting his feelings around them so that they reach the last man in the second violin section. And when this happens—when one hundred men share his feelings, exactly, simultaneously, responding as one to each rise and fall of the music, to each point of arrival and departure, to each little inner pulse—then there is a human identity of feeling that has no equal elsewhere. It is the closest thing I know to love itself.” —American conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), The Joy of Music (1959)