Leonard Bernstein contributed so much to the world of music that it’s taking two years to celebrate his centennial.

He was the first American-born conductor of a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. And of course, he guest conducted orchestras all over the world. He was a virtuoso pianist.

Like George Gershwin, he composed in both “classical” and popular styles, with the result that critics don’t always take his “serious” music seriously.

For all that, Bernstein regarded himself primarily as a music educator. He saw it as his primary goal to increase musical knowledge, not just among music students and professional musicians, but also the general public. He wrote:

There is a lurking didactic streak in me that turns every program into a discourse, whether I utter a word or not; my performing impulse has always been to share my feelings, or knowledge, or speculations about music––to provoke thought, suggest historical perspective, encourage the intersection of musical lines.

He pursued this mission both as writer and lecturer. He delivered his lectures on camera. Video technology has advanced since his day, but anyone can find him holding forth on new media, such as DVD and YouTube.

Bernstein’s early activity in music appreciation

Bernstein’s activity in teaching music appreciation began in 1945, when he presented a lecture to the In and About Pittsburgh Music Educator’s Club titled “Our American Popular Music: Its Relation to the Tonal American Music Culture.”

The following year, he conducted the top orchestra at the High School of Music and Art in New York City. Rehearsals were open to the public, and he had microphones at the podium so the audience could hear what he told the orchestra.

As his conducting career took off, he also increased his educational activities and began to demonstrate his points at the piano during his lectures.

An article in Etude Magazine (1947) titled “The Essence of Musical Study” was the first of dozens of articles he published. HIs articles appeared in both for professional journals and such popular magazines as The Atlantic, Vogue, and Gentlemen’s Quarterly. He wrote not only on classical music, but also jazz and Broadway musicals. Laster, he revised many of his articles for publication in his books.

Teaching America about music on television

Omnibus

The Ford Foundation created a series of 90-minute educational television programs called Omnibus, which started on CBS in 1952. The show migrated to ABC and NBC during its lifetime. Bernstein appeared on ten programs, beginning in 1954.

His first program, on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, is one of the best-remembered episodes. Based on his study of Beethoven’s sketch books, Bernstein demonstrated what the symphony might have become if Beethoven had retained some of the material he discarded.

Young People’s Concerts

The New York Philharmonic Orchestra has long been dedicated to offering concerts to young people. Theodore Thomas led the first such concerts during the 1885-1886 season. Josef Stransky began the series specifically titled Young People’s Concerts in 1914.

When Bernstein took over the New York Philharmonic in 1957, his official title was Musical Director of the New York Philharmonic Symphony and Musical Director of the Young People’s Concerts.

Bernstein persuaded CBS to televise the Young People’s Concerts in 1957. The primetime programs drew a huge audience from all over the country. Many people of that generation traced their love of music, and even their intention to become professional musicians, to watching them.

After he stepped down from being musical director of the Philharmonic in 1969, he continued to lead the Young People’s Concerts until 1972.

During that time, he led 53 concerts, which appeared on national television broadcasts. They earned him the informal title of “America’s Music Teacher.” They enabled him to reach tens of millions of people. So important did he consider these concerts that when he took a sabbatical from the orchestra during the 1964-1965 season, he continued to conduct the Young People’s Concerts.

Each season had four concerts, each given twice: the first time on a Saturday at noon and the second that evening. In the early years, the noon concert was broadcast live. After videotape became available, the noon concert became a run-through and the evening concert was taped for later broadcast. It was so difficult to obtain tickets to the live concerts that some parents put their newborns on the waiting list for subscribers.

In syndication, the concerts were dubbed into twelve foreign languages and shown in 40 countries.

Here’s an excerpt from the first lecture:

Bernstein in academia

Brandeis University

In 1951, Bernstein joined the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University as Professor of Music and Director of the School of Creative Arts. Courses he taught include modern music, opera, and composition.

He remained on Brandeis’ faculty, with changing job titles, until 1956. During that time, he was on leave twice. He returned as Fellow of the University in 1958 and served in that capacity until 1974.

Harvard University

Bernstein was invited to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University during the 1972-1973 academic year. This series of lectures started in 1925 to honor a former professor of art history at Harvard. It bears the official title Norton Lecturer of Poetry, but poetry, broadly defined, includes music. Bernstein thus joined such distinguished musicians as Paul Hindemith, Igor Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland as Norton Lecturer. He titled his series of six lectures The Unanswered Question, a reference to a work by Charles Ives.

The professorship is a one-year appointment that requires residency on campus during that year. Besides delivering six public lectures, the professor is available to counsel students. Bernstein took up that part of the task with such enthusiasm that the student newspaper named him “Man of the Year.”

Although the schedule called for him to deliver the lectures in the spring of 1973, his schedule and the sheer difficulty of preparing them caused him to postpone them till the following fall.

Leonard Bernstein had what his daughter Jamie calls “Torah lishmah,” a raging thirst for knowledge. In his Norton Lectures, he said, “The best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline.” Besides music, he eagerly studied various topics of history, literature, drama, and science. And he especially enjoyed exploring where they overlapped.

Preparing the Norton Lectures

Bernstein took a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the lectures. Among other non-musical influences, he depended on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories. For his first order of business, therefore, he had to organize his wide-ranging ideas into six coherent talks, with each building on the previous one.

Then he had to not only write but memorize the lectures. They included hundreds of musical examples. He played some at the piano. For others, he videotaped performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic.

He actually gave each lecture twice, once to a live audience on campus and again in a studio to tape it for television.

Bernstein began the first lecture with Copland’s Piano Variations and identified the same four-note motive underlying so many other works. Then, beginning with Bach, he used the series to trace how harmonic language became more complex over time. With Schoenberg and his school, tonality completely disappeared.

Because he was unwilling to give up tonality, “experts” dismissed Bernstein’s music as lightweight. But in the Norton Lectures, Bernstein considered both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, his bitter rival. Stravinsky, by maintaining tonality but later embracing tone rows, had, in Bernstein’s view, answered Ives’s “unanswered question.” Bernstein pointed to a future where composers could embrace eclecticism, accept influence from any kind of music. Sort of like his own compositional style!

Bernstein’s educational legacy

Late in life, Bernstein planned to collaborate with the Institute of the Arts in Nashville, Tennessee. He died before he could realize his vision of arts-based education. His family and estate carried out his intention, however, by endowing the Leonard Bernstein Center for Education through the Arts in Nashville 1992.

Now called Artful Learning, the center no longer operates from Nashville. It operates in seventeen schools in eight states and uses arts-based strategies across the curriculum.

Operating in seventeen schools is a far cry from broadcasts that reach millions of people. Probably no single individual will ever have Bernstein’s. influence again. That’s not because we no longer have musicians that combine comparable musical and communication skills.

Many academic musicians of Bernstein’s lifetime disdained tonal music and wanted all their students to write serial music, or chance music, or whatever narrow choice they had made for themselves. Audiences hated this music, and composers despised audiences. Music by living composers became poison at the box office.

Bernstein lived to see a generation of composers emerge that genuinely want concert audiences to like their music. These composers don’t hesitate to write tonal music and even draw on popular music for inspiration. Not a one of them has become as well-known as even some of the second- and third-tier composers of Bernstein’s own generation. And classical music has not learned to market itself.

Sources:
The contributions of Leonard Bernstein to music education: an analysis of his 53 Young People’s Concerts / Brian David Rozen. PhD dissertation: Eastman School of Music, 1997
Leonard Bernstein: a born teacher / Jamie Bernstein. Leonard Bernstein at 100
Music; some questions unsolved by a man with all the answers / Allan Kozinn, New York Times. June 2, 2002
Norton Lectures / Leonard Bernstein at 100

Photo credits:
1959 portrait. Wikimedia Commons
Young People’s Concert.  Wikimedia Commons [deleted]
Norton Lecture. Screen shot, source unknown
1973 portrait. Photo by Allan Warren via Wikimedia Commons