Customer Reviews

The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

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In response the reviewer who complains that Leonard Bernstein raises more questions than he answers, the composer never purports to be doing anything in these lectures than raise informed points -- hence the title, The Unanswered Question. He gives an extremely cogent hypothesis to explain how and why we perceive music on an emotional level, and from what I've heard, nothing's been shown to disprove his ideas.

Beware that although Bernstein tries to put everything in "layman"'s terms, many of the concepts touched upon will be difficult to understand without a rudimentary knowledge of musical notation.

I found this 'book' to be extremely interesting and a unique, welcome perspective on the nature of music. Those of you interested in Bernstein's compositions will get a nice long look at the inner workings of the mind of one of America's greatest composers; and even if his insights as to the answers of the questions he's asking are erroneous, the manner in which he couches said questions is insightful in and of itself, and more than worth the investment.

I respect Bernstein even more as a scholar of music and languages than I do as a conductor. I thought this was an inspired literary work of his, really. For example, his explanation of musical motive in Beethoven's 5th Symphony where we are shown that Beethoven has taken the common coda form, TA TA TA DUM, that many classical works end with, and turned it to a motive from which derives the motion and power of HIS entire symphony. That is Bernstein at his most insightful and brilliant. Wonderful! Illuminating! I would never have thought of things that only a conductor and musicologist can otherwise understand and explain. Thank you Lenny, we love you!

The Unanswered Question, the transcript of six lectures delivered at Hardvard in 1973, outline a new theory of music. Inspired by work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists, Bernstein attempts to find a system of musical grammar analagous to that of language. This is the weakest part of the book. He makes strained generalizations and is attempting to show something that quite possibly isn't true. Starting with the third lecture, however, his work becomes stronger. He includes an efficient analysis of Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony without any extramusical associations. Then he proceeds (with musical examples) to trace the "twentieth century crisis" in music and how Schoenberg and Stravinsky derived different "solutions." This is the strongest past of the book, and certianly worth suffereing through the first two weaker lectures. "The Unasnwered Question" is strongest for raising questions rather than answering them.

There is little to say that has not already been said. These lectures are classic because of their multi-disciplinary focus. Simiply put, they are an integration of diverse material that fosters an awareness of the larger picture. In the final analysis all intellectual disciplnes are arbitrary in terms of lines drawn in the sand. Ultimately they all come together as a whole. The Norton Lectures underscore this theme as well as any piece written in the 20th century.

This is genius. Only now scientific research is proving his incredible leap of imagination.