The Unanswered Question: Six Talks At Harvard

Filmed in 1973, when the late composer/maestro Leonard Bernstein was a visiting professor at Harvard University, this series of six talks strives to answer what Bernstein feels Charles Ives' was asking in his piece The Unanswered Question: "whither music in our time?" Speaking before a group of students, the energetic and eloquent Bernstein says that "music is a mysterious and metaphorical art, but also a science." And it's the science part that interests Bernstein during the opening volumes of the series. Using Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics as a model, Bernstein asks whether there is a grammar of music which may roughly correspond to the transformational grammar outlined by Chomsky. In a delightful reminiscence, Bernstein recalls becoming fired by this idea, and spending an entire evening imagining himself as an early hominid grasping towards a rudimentary language, and from language to examples of what might have been the earliest musical sounds. Which is not to say, however, that Bernstein's lectures are sidesplitters. They are for serious aspirants studying music. In the second half of this opening volume--Musical Phonology--Bernstein examines the pentatonic, diatonic, and chromatic scales in terms of musical linguistics. It's a fairly dense verbal thicket that Bernstein erects, requiring at least a passing knowledge of grammar and a basic understanding of musical terminology. The program concludes with a stirring performance of Mozart's "Symphony No. 40 in g minor, K. 550" by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bernstein. The comparison of music and speech is explored further in the second volume, Musical Syntax, in which Bernstein explores the musical equivalents of transformational grammar concepts such as deletions, conjoinings, embeddings, and inversion. The four other volumes in the series are: Musical Semantics, The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity, The Twentieth Century Crisis, and The Poetry of Earth. Keeping in mind that this is aimed at serious music lovers, The Unanswered Question is a challenging and often brilliant dissection of the underlying structures of music. Recommended. (Available from most distributors.)