A Screening of Leonard Bernstein's
The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard
Part I

April 14, 2003 at Bad Animals

The previously scheduled April SCA Score Salon (Steve Allen on Wagner's Tristan and Isolde) has been rescheduled to June 9th. In its place, the SCA Score Salon is proud to present a screening of the first tape in the famous Leonard Bernstein lecture, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (1973).

In 1971, Leonard Bernstein was invited to become the Charles Elliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University. This one-year position had previously been held by such notable musical figures as Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland, and by poets such as e.e. cummings and W.H. Auden. The professorship required Bernstein to deliver of a series of six public lectures. Those lectures (first addressed to the students, then subsequently filmed for television) comprise the six sections of The Unanswered Question.

Always absorbing, frequently brilliant, and occasionally bordering on mind-blowing psychedelia, Leonard Bernstein's The Unanswered Question is a lucid and convincing survey of music's history and forms and the common threads in music with culture, physics, language, and science. Starting with musical syntax, Bernstein discusses the overtone series, the relationship between melody and speech patterns, and the continuum of certain rhythms that can be found as common throughout the world in various styles and ethnicities.

The talks were transcribed for a book, but in it Bernstein insists "The pages that follow were written not to be read, but listened to." The talks are, in fact, performances. Television was always kind to Bernstein; he had magnetism and knew how to use it. To illustrate various points in his analyses, he plays the piano frequently, sings occasionally, and conducts significant works of key composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner, Ravel, Debussy, Ives, Mahler, and Stravinsky.

These talks are a key document. They coincide chronologically, as cause and/or symptom, with the movement of America's leading composers back from Schoenbergian forms toward a tonal orientation. Bernstein predicts and promotes this movement, which is still in progress. He is clearly an advocate of tonality, but he discusses atonal music with sympathy and understanding.

2003 Past Events