Leonard Bernstein

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Seldes
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Michael Sy Uy

From the end of World War II through the U.S. Bicentennial, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation granted close to $300 million (approximately $2.3 billion in 2017 dollars) in the field of music alone. In deciding what to fund, these three grantmaking institutions decided to “ask the experts,” adopting seemingly objective, scientific models of peer review and specialist evaluation. They recruited music composers at elite institutions, professors from prestigious universities, and leaders of performing arts organizations. Among the most influential expert-consultants were Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss, and Milton Babbitt. The significance was twofold: not only were male, Western art composers put in charge of directing large and unprecedented channels of public and private funds, but also, in doing so, they determined and defined what was meant by artistic excellence. They decided the fate of their peers and shaped the direction of music making in this country. By asking the experts, the grantmaking institutions produced a concentrated and interconnected field of artists and musicians. Officers and directors utilized ostensibly objective financial tools like matching grants and endowments in an attempt to diversify and stabilize applicants’ sources of funding, as well as the number of applicants they funded. Such economics-based strategies, however, relied more on personal connections among the wealthy and elite, rather than local community citizens. Ultimately, this history demonstrates how “expertise” served as an exclusionary form of cultural and social capital that prevented racial minorities and nondominant groups from fully participating.


Author(s):  
Dave Headlam

The information age has pushed music performance into the era of music informance, in which information and performance are combined in an integrated way. The types of presentation formats and analytical information found in public music theory are ideal for music informance, and present-day explorations of informance on the Internet have a history of noted musical informants including Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould. In order to continue to be relevant and to thrive in our connected world, live and recorded music scenarios need to develop ever more innovative ways to enhance music performance with information effectively presented in music informance.


Dearest Lenny ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 224-230
Author(s):  
Mari Yoshihara

The project for this book began with the author’s accidental discovery of Kazuko Amano’s and Kunihiko Hashimoto’s letters in the Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress. Subsequent research in various archives and corresponding with and meeting the two individuals, in Tokyo and Sydney, respectively, took her on an unexpected journey as a scholar and a writer. In this coda, the author reflects upon her findings and the research process, as well as the portent of correspondence, especially handwritten letters sent through what is now colloquially called snail mail that shaped Amano’s and Hashimoto’s special relationship with Bernstein.


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