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About Educator The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard

Photo by Douglas M. Bruce, Harvard University, Boston, MA, 1971

Composer Conductor Educator Humanitarian More

Norton Lectures
Amazon
At the beginning of his rst Norton Lecture, Leonard Bernstein explained the importance of The Unanswered
"inter-disciplinary values - that the best way to 'know' a thing is in the context of another Question - Six Talks at
discipline." In these six lectures, Bernstein communicated his ideas of the universality of
Harvard by Leonard
Bernstein
musical language through wide-ranging analogies to linguistics, aesthetic philosophy,
acoustics as well as music history. However, while many of his ideas are intellectually Available on DVD
challenging, the great achievement of the lectures is that through their breadth they make
complex musical concepts accessible to a general audience.
Lectures, Scripts & Writings
Leonard Bernstein was invited to become the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at The Unanswered
Harvard University in 1971. This one-year position had previously been held by such notable Question: Six Talks at
musical gures as Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland, and by poets such as e.e. cummings Harvard
and W.H. Auden. The professorship required Bernstein to live on campus for one school year,
Excerpts from the lectures with
counsel students and, most signicantly, deliver of a series of six public lectures. Bernstein, a interactive media and examples
"Harvard man" himself, was pleased and honored to become a part of this distinguished
tradition.
Back to
Bernstein began his residency at Harvard in the fall of 1972. He immersed himself in the Educator
academic culture with enthusiasm, and his popularity with students resulted in his being
named "Man of the Year" by Harvard's student newspaper. His daughter Jamie was an
undergraduate at Radclie at the time, so his involvement in the University's student life had
special meaning for him.

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6/7/2017 TheUnansweredQuestion:SixTalksatHarvard|Educator|About|LeonardBernstein

Bernstein was scheduled to give the six lectures in the spring of 1973, but with a full schedule
of various composing projects and conducting engagements, he postponed the lectures until
the fall. Preparing for the lectures was no small undertaking, and Bernstein wanted to have
the time to make the most of this unique opportunity.

Because the lectures embraced such a wide variety of disciplines, Bernstein faced the
challenge of organizing his ideas into a coherent progression of six talks. Also, every word
had to be written out and memorized because each of the lectures was to be presented
twice: live at the University and then in a subsequent taping session for television.

Bernstein used hundreds of musical examples during the course of the lectures. Many of
these he could play on the piano, but each lecture also featured Bernstein conducting entire
movements and even complete works. These needed to be rehearsed and then lmed for
presentation during the lectures. The Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna
Philharmonic were employed for this purpose.

The rst lecture, on October 9, 1973 began with Bernstein referring to Copland's Piano
Variations, a work he had fallen in love with as an undergraduate at Harvard. He recalled his
discovery that the four germinal notes of this work were also seed for other pieces ranging
from a Bach fugue to Stravinsky's Octet to something Bernstein heard played by the Uday
Shan-kar Dance Company. "From that time," Bernstein confessed, " ...the notion of a
worldwide, inborn musical grammar has haunted me."

Bernstein based much of the lectures on the linguistic theories Noam Chomsky set out in his
book, "Language and Mind." In the rst three lectures, Bernstein analyzed music in linguistic
terms phonology (sound), syntax (structure) and semantics (meaning)--focusing on music
from the Classical period. In the fourth lecture ("The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity"),
Bernstein looked at music from the Romantic period, with its heightened harmonic
uncertainties and structural freedoms. The fth lecture ("The Twentieth Century Crisis")
outlined the movement toward atonality and the crisis provoked by this crucial change in our
musical language. Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question," one of the primary musical
examples, became Bernstein's title for the entire series of lectures. The nal lecture ("The
Poetry of the Earth") concentrated on the work of Igor Stravinsky, whom Bernstein thought
had found a musical answer to "the unanswered question," one that kept tonality at its center.
The series ended with Bernstein's artistic and philosophical "credo," an essentially optimistic
and celebratory statement of beliefs.

Although the very breadth of the lectures attracted some negative criticism, they were also
widely recognized as an impressive achievement. Lavishly multi-disciplinary long before it
was fashionable, they provided a fresh way to analyze music and interpret musical history.
The Norton Lectures stand as a special monument in Bernstein's legacy.

For a listing of Norton Lectures that have been released on DVD, visit the Leonard Bernstein
Store.

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