Bernstein's Harvard lectures linked music and language

Person: Leonard Bernstein
Lived: 1918–1990
Field: Music
From: American

The story

Leonard Bernstein had graduated from Harvard in 1939, and more than three decades later the university invited him back. For the 1972 to 1973 academic year he was appointed to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair as Professor of Poetry, one of the most prestigious lectureships in the humanities, previously held by composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith. The holder's main duty is to deliver a series of public lectures.

Bernstein set himself an ambitious goal: to explain how music communicates by drawing on the linguist Noam Chomsky's theory that all humans share an innate grammar. To prepare, he made himself a student again, immersing himself in linguistics. Busy with other commissions, he postponed the lectures from the spring to the autumn of 1973, so his residency stretched to three semesters. His daughter Jamie later recalled that he was never happier than during those months on the Harvard campus.

He took the title of the six lectures, The Unanswered Question, from a work by Charles Ives. The first three, on musical phonology, syntax and semantics, asked where music comes from. The fourth and fifth examined the crisis of twentieth-century music through Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and the sixth, The Poetry of Earth, considered where music should go next. Bernstein illustrated his points at the piano and with performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra recorded in advance. The lectures were long: the last ran for more than three hours.

Bernstein planned from the start for the talks to reach far beyond Harvard. Each was videotaped at the WGBH studios in Boston immediately after it was given, and he paid for much of the project himself. The series was broadcast on PBS and later on the BBC, released on home video and published as a book in 1976. As a result the lectures became far more widely known than those of any earlier Norton professor.

Some music theorists questioned his use of linguistics, but the lectures sparked lasting debate about tonality and the meaning of music, and led to guest posts at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. They remain one of the best-known attempts by a great performer to explain why music moves people.