Bernstein's contribution as a musical educator is
monumental. His televised concerts for young people are seen as one of the most
significant contributions to music education especially in the U.S. Throughout
his life he viewed learning and educating as almost a duty and shared his
knowledge and experience to many thousands directly and millions more through
television and radio.
The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard
Annotation (by Artie Samplaski):
This is the book form of the 1973 Norton Lectures, given by Bernstein; video and LP recordings of the lecture series were also released. Bernstein's main concern was to discuss the crisis of music in the twentieth century caused by the abandonment of tonality as the primary organizing force (a viewpoint for which he was vilified). His starting point, however, is Noam Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar, as coming into contact with Chomsky's work had revived his earlier thinking on the possibility of musical universals. Bernstein borrows Chomskian concepts in a liberal fashion for his first three lectures, "Musical Phonology," "Musical Syntax," and "Musical Semantics;" of these, the latter two are the talks most concerned with rhythmic issues. In "Musical Syntax," Bernstein discusses processes of metrical deletion and expansion as transformations leading to an enriched, poetic surface structure. He gives an extended comparison of how such processes, particularly deletion, are used in Shakespeare's Sonnet no. 66 and the opening of Mozart's Symphony no. 40, K. 550 to yield more interesting final products. In "Musical Semantics," Bernstein discusses the use of various rhetorical figures of speech as further transformational devices to provide emphasis and direction to phrases. He gives a fairly detailed analysis of the opening section of the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, showing how the repetition of certain motivic features to expand the phrase length can be viewed rhetorically.
Throughout his life, Bernstein championed Tanglewood, set
up by his mentor Serge Koussevitzky. He taught many classes at Tanglewood and
was instrumental in the setting up of what was planned to be the European
equivalent in the region of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. At the end of his
life the triumvirate was complete with the formation of the Japanese equivalent
in Sapporo.
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N.B. The above are either the U.S. or U.K. published
versions.
Please let me know of any omissions or
errors.