Leonard Bernstein’s Testament — The Unanswered Question in the Light of Conducting Issues

In 1973, Leonard Bernstein gave a series of six lectures at Harvard University, entitled The Unanswered Question: Six talks at Harvard. This interdisciplinary course, drawing on Noam Chomsky's theory of transformational-generative grammar, presented an original conception of music as a universal language based on tonality and outlined the history of its development, concluding with Bernstein’s personal credo regarding its future. The argumentation used, although encompassing fields as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and art history, was based primarily on musical analyses presented at the piano, supplemented by recordings of the symphonic works being discussed, performed under the baton of Bernstein himself. The Harvard lectures thus represent the summa of his aesthetic reflections and performance experiences, providing a unique insight into his views on music and its interpretation. This paper focuses on synthesising these views, subjecting them to factual verification, and then showing their influence on Bernstein's art of conducting through the example of the recordings used in The Unanswered Question series, focusing in particular on the issue of expression.

In 1973, Leonard Bernstein gave a series of six lectures at Harvard University, entitled The Unanswered Question: Six talks at Harvard. This interdisciplinary course, drawing on Noam Chomsky's theory of transformational-generative grammar, presented an original conception of music as a universal language based on tonality and outlined the history of its development, concluding with Bernstein’s personal credo regarding its future. The argumentation used, although encompassing fields as diverse as linguistics, literary studies, philosophy and art history, was based primarily on musical analyses presented at the piano, supplemented by recordings of the symphonic works being discussed, performed under the baton of Bernstein himself. The Harvard lectures thus represent the summa of his aesthetic reflections and performance experiences, providing a unique insight into his views on music and its interpretation. This paper focuses on synthesising these views, subjecting them to factual verification, and then showing their influence on Bernstein's art of conducting through the example of the recordings used in The Unanswered Question series, focusing in particular on the issue of expression.