Aufbruch in die Neue Welt: Leonard Bernstein in New York

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-54
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Schreiber
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Leonard Bernstein

The Frustrated Activist

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
New Left ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
Political Commitments

This chapter presents an account of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, who, although constrained significantly by the ideological climate of the 1950s, refused to silence himself politically. Beginning in the last years of the decade, he became increasingly vocal in his support for New Left causes, including the antiwar, antinuclear, and civil rights movements. On State Department–funded conducting tours with the New York Philharmonic, he tried to use music, particularly the Americanist tradition, to challenge US foreign policy. In his compositions, he remained true to musical Americanism, striving earnestly in his art music to continue Copland’s prewar approach. He found a fruitful outlet for his political commitments in his works for musical theater, but his art music compositions present a much more complex and fraught picture. Bernstein was attempting to resist and undermine political nationalism, while simultaneously advancing cultural nationalism. But in the binarized climate of Cold War America, this would not prove easy.

‘LA NOTATION NE PEUT RENDRE COMPTE DU FAIT’: PERFORMING MURAIL'S ‘TERRITOIRES DE L'OUBLI’

Tempo ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 62 (244) ◽  
pp. 2-10
Author(s):  
Marilyn Nonken
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
State University ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Musical Thought ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Morton Feldman ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Old Order ◽  
Brian Ferneyhough

For contemporary music in America and Europe, the 1970s were a time in which the old order was changing, giving place to a new avant-garde. In Germany, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik was stagnating under the inept leadership of Ernst Thomas, savaged by the press and ridden with inner squabbling and politics. For 25 years a bastion of musical innovation and experimentation, Darmstadt now seemed little more than ‘the crumbling edifice of the avant-garde's chief fortress’. The focus was shifting to Paris, where, in 1977, IRCAM opened beneath the Centre Georges Pompidou. Led by Pierre Boulez and staffed by Luciano Berio, Vinko Globokar, Max Mathews, and Jean-Claude Risset, its stated mission was to reunite science and music and create new modes of performance. Across the Channel, the composers of the New Complexity (Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon, Richard Barrett, and Chris Dench) were also redefining performance practice, focusing not on technology but on notation and its implications for virtuosity. And in America, different schools of musical thought were colliding in the streets and the academy. Leonard Bernstein delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, then presented his ‘unanswered question’ to the American public, on television, in 1976. And uptown and downtown were ensconced, with Milton Babbitt and Morton Feldman appointed to the faculties at the Juilliard School and the State University of New York at Buffalo, respectively. On both sides of the Atlantic, seminal artistic statements were being made, heralding the unruly adolescence of a new and disparate avant-garde no longer directly connected to the Second World War.

scholarly journals Modernist Music for Children

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 488-517
Author(s):  
David H. Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Anton Webern ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Christian Science ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Christian Science Monitor ◽  
Middlebrow Culture ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
Rhetorical Force

On several occasions in the midcentury United States, the music of Anton Webern was reimagined as music for children. In 1936 conductor and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published the score of Webern’s op. 10/4 on the children’s page of the Christian Science Monitor. In 1958 Webern’s op. 6/3 was featured in a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, the first conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Eight years later, Webern’s Kinderstück (Children’s Piece) received its posthumous premiere at Lincoln Center, performed by a nine-year-old pianist. In each case children served as a marker of accessibility, meant to render Webern’s music more palatable to adult audiences; thus was Webern’s music subsumed within the middlebrow circulation of classical music. Although recent scholarship has considered the intersections between modernist music and middlebrow culture, Webern’s music has remained absent from these discussions. Indeed, Webern’s terse, abstract, and severe compositions might at first appear ill suited to middlebrow contexts. Yet, as these three historical moments make clear, children served as a potent rhetorical force that could be used to market even this music to a broad audience of adults.

The Return of Two Maestros

Dearest Lenny ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 42-55
Author(s):  
Mari Yoshihara
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Rapid Rise ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
Her Family ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
November Steps

In 1970, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic returned to Japan for the second tour, again with Seiji Ozawa. The tour was organized partly in conjunction with the Osaka Expo ’70, symbolizing Japan’s rapid rise as an economic power and the expansion of the classical music fan base in the nation. Seiji Ozawa, now an international maestro in his own right, led the tour along with Bernstein and conducted Toru Takemitsu’s November Steps. During the tour, Kazuko Amano and her family enjoyed their second encounter with Bernstein, but her joyful time was cut short by her domestic obligations.

Time Marches On

2019 ◽  
pp. 221-254
Author(s):  
Stephen A. Crist
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
The Real ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Time Out ◽  
Time Changes

This chapter first picks up and develops three strands in Dave Brubeck’s biography, which were introduced in the opening chapters of the book: the Quartet’s work with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, Brubeck’s involvement in issues of civil rights, and Dave and Iola Brubeck’s efforts to bring The Real Ambassadors to fruition. The balance of the chapter considers the early critical reception of Time Out, sketches the outlines of its four sequels (Time Further Out, Countdown: Time in Outer Space, Time Changes, and Time In), and examines the circumstances surrounding the dissolution of the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1967.

scholarly journals Leonard Bernstein's Jewish Boston: Cross-Disciplinary Research in the Classroom

2009 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-33
Author(s):  
CAROL J. OJA ◽  
KAY KAUFMAN SHELEMAY
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
New York Philharmonic ◽  
Immigrant Experiences ◽  
Low Culture ◽  
Prep School ◽  
American Society ◽  
Iconic Status

AbstractLeonard Bernstein is most often perceived as the quintessential New Yorker—music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1969 and composer of Broadway shows that made New York their focus. Yet his grounding in the greater Boston area was powerful. He was born in 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and raised in various Jewish neighborhoods within Boston. The young Leonard went to Boston Latin, a prestigious public prep school, and graduated from Harvard in 1939.This article explores a team research project, made up of Harvard graduate students and undergraduates, which delved into the urban subcultures and post-immigrant experiences that shaped Bernstein's youth and early adulthood. It considers the synergy between an individual and a community, and it examines the complexities of blending pedagogy with research, analyzing the multilayered methodologies and theoretical strategies that were employed.Given Bernstein's iconic status, his life and career illuminate a broad range of questions about the nature of music in American society. Fusing the techniques of ethnographic and archival research, our team probed Bernstein's formative connections to Jewish traditions through his family synagogue (Congregation Mishkan Tefila), the ethnic geography that defined the Boston neighborhoods of his immigrant family, the network of young people involved in Bernstein's summer theatrical productions in Sharon, Massachusetts, during the 1930s, and the formative role of the city's musical venues and institutions in shaping Bernstein's lifelong campaign to collapse traditional distinctions between high and low culture.

Taking the Town

2019 ◽  
pp. 18-30
Author(s):  
Andy Propst
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
The Town

Betty Comden and Adolph Green returned to New York from Hollywood in 1944 unsure of what they would do next for work. They found some performing in nightclubs, but it wasn’t until they were approached by Leonard Bernstein, an old friend, and Jerome Robbins about developing a book for a musical that was to be inspired by Fancy Free, a ballet that the men had created together, that they found their genuine footing. The collaboration became, of course, the landmark musical On the Town, and not only did Comden and Green write the book and lyrics for it; they also had two of the primary roles in the show when it opened in December 1945.

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