Seymour: An Introduction (2014)

Seymour Bernstein: Self

Quotes 

• Seymour Bernstein : Life has conflicts and pleasures, harmony and dissonance. That's how life is. Can't escape it. By the way, the same thing occurs in music. There are dissonances in harmony, and resolutions. I believe that you won't enjoy the resolution unless you have that dissonance. What would it be if we didn't have the dissonance? We wouldn't know the meaning of the resolution.

• Seymour Bernstein : Let us shed our guilt concerning the soft pedal.

• Seymour Bernstein : I'm not so sure that a major career is a healthy thing to embark upon. I see my colleagues who have major careers suffer terribly.

• Seymour Bernstein : I never dreamt that with my own two hands, I could touch the sky.

• Seymour Bernstein : The struggle is what makes the art form. I go to war for my art form.

• Seymour Bernstein : I create a translucent dome around myself. a protective dome. Outside are flying all the ravens who symbolize all the people who are detractors in my life, who don't want me to succeed for their own selfish reasons. Even though I can see them, they can't touch me anymore.

• Seymour Bernstein : People search for some answers, some stability, that will make them lead a happier life. It says in the Bible, "The help cometh from the Lord within." I call it a spiritual reservoir. I don't call it God. Most people don't tap that resource of the God within. What upsets me about religion is that the answers always seem to be apart from us in the form of the deity, and we depend on the deity for salvation. But I firmly believe that it's within us.

• Liam Kaplan : Music is just, like, my being. Everything I do is somehow related to music, just like the way I act - it's all music. When I'm playing the piano, I have to listen so carefully and with such precision to what's coming out of the instrument.

  Seymour Bernstein : And love.

  Liam Kaplan : And love, yeah. And when you apply that to listening to someone speak, you can really catch a lot of their emotions. So just learning to listen to yourself makes you able to listen to other people.

• Seymour Bernstein : When you reach my age, you stop playing games. You stop lying to people and you just say what's really in your heart. And you find out that it's the greatest compliment to someone when you really say the truth and don't just say what they expect you to say.

• Seymour Bernstein : In contemplating my own connection to music, I always return to the same answer: universal order. If the heavenly constellations offer us visual proof of this order, then music must be its aural manifestation. Through its language we become one with the stars.

• Seymour Bernstein : Philosophers have said that music is most divine, that music, like God, is invisible. You can't see it. It's intangible. And yet it has this most penetrating of effects. And so it is a direct emanation of the transcendent beauty of the beloved.

• Seymour Bernstein : Without craft, there isn't any real artistry.

• Seymour Bernstein : Music speaks concordantly to a troubled world, dispelling loneliness and discontent, its voice discovering in it those deep recesses of thought and feeling where truth implants itself. Music offers no quarter for compromise, no excuses, no subterfuge, no shoddy workmanship. And we sense in music an extension of ourselves, a reminder of our own potential for perfection.

• Seymour Bernstein : You didn't tell them what I told you about nervousness and Sarah Bernhardt. She went to her dressing room to dress for a performance, and in front of the door there was a young actress with an autograph book. With a trembling hand, she signed her autograph. The young actress was just amazed at the trembling hand. And she said, "Madam, I don't mean to be presumptuous, but I see that you're nervous. Why is it that I never get nervous when I have to act?" And she took her hand and said, "Oh, my poor dear, you will get nervous - when you learn how to act."

• Seymour Bernstein : The most important thing that music teachers can do for their pupils is to inspire and encourage an emotional response not just for music but more importantly for all aspects of life.

• Ethan Hawke : Jackson Pollock and Marlon Brando were all pretty notoriously horrible people.

  Seymour Bernstein : They were. And there are musicians who are monsters, yeah.

  Ethan Hawke : Glenn Gould, for example.

  Seymour Bernstein : He was a total neurotic mess.

• Seymour Bernstein : Everybody knows that Glenn Gould was a genius. And technically he had few equals. He was so extraordinary. But what peeves me about him - he was so famous for Bach, right? But when I hear his Bach, I'm not aware that I'm listening to Bach. I'm only aware I'm listening to Glenn Gould.

• Seymour Bernstein : Our art is totally predictable. Music will never change. When Beethoven puts a B-flat down, that's there forever.