The Unanswered Question

“A summation of his beliefs about music as he looked into the final quarter of the 20th century...Bernstein’s talks still seem surprisingly fresh. But words were nearly as much Bernstein’s métier as music.”—New York Times

Six in-depth lessons on the language of music from the legendary, Grammy Award–winning conductor.

The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein’s musical creativity have been recognized and enjoyed by millions. These lectures, a special monument in Bernstein's legacy, also make fascinating reading. “Nobody anywhere presents this material so warmly, so sincerely, so skillfully,” says the composer Virgil Thomson. “As musical mind-openers they are first class; as pedagogy they are matchless.”

Bernstein considers genres ranging from folk and pop to Hindu ragas, along with symphonic works from Mozart and Ravel to Ives and Copland. Drawing on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory, he suggests that each has roots in a “worldwide, inborn musical grammar,” and explores how this grammar generates such a staggeringly diverse array of musical dialects. He also mines his own experience as a master composer and conductor to delve beneath music’s aesthetic surface, discovering the hidden acoustic transformations that create unconscious resonance for listeners. Finally, examining twentieth-century crises in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bernstein discovers a new iteration of the deep poetry of musical expression—finding, even in the throes of experimentalism, echoes of all that had come before.

Armed with nearly one hundred notated examples and abundant charisma, Bernstein shows here that, in addition to being a consummate musical prodigy, he was also a master teacher. These talks remain among the composer’s greatest achievements.