This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Leonard Bernstein made this remark in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. As music director of the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein addressed the audience at a memorial concert held shortly after the killing, framing the orchestra’s performance as an artistic and moral response to public grief and political violence. The statement reflects his conviction that music and culture are not luxuries but civic acts—ways of affirming human dignity and communal solidarity when events threaten to overwhelm them.

Bernstein frames art not as escapism but as an active, ethical response to brutality. “Reply to violence” implies that violence demands an answer, yet he rejects retaliation in kind; instead, the counterforce is intensified devotion to beauty, discipline, and expressive truth. The comparative structure—“more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly”—suggests that the proper artistic response is not mere continuation but deepening: grief and outrage are transmuted into heightened commitment. The line also implies a civic function for music: it can gather a wounded public, offer meaning without propaganda, and affirm human values precisely when they are under assault.

1) “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
2) “Our response to violence will be to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”