Guest Commentary by Sarah Gurley-Green, a freelance writer relocated to the Boston area after many years in London. She writes on topics including medicine, food, music and the arts and other aspects of life as we know it.
There is a look in a young child’s face when he or she truly feels a beat of music or a chord resonates deeply within. There is a time in every young person’s life when he or she turns to music when words no longer seem able to communicate the complexity of the feelings inside. These children are today’s children, they are we as children, and they are the children in our towns and in every country in the world. Music speaks to us all because it is a language without boundaries of generation or geography.
On April 15th The Lexington Symphony will be playing Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story Dances at the season finale concert. If you do not know the works of Leonard Bernstein, this is a great introduction; if you do, you know you are in for a special treat. For many of us, Bernstein will forever be remembered as the floppy-haired, slightly damp, and always enthusiastic man who told us about music on TV.
For 15 consecutive seasons (1958-1972), Leonard Bernstein wrote and conducted The Young People’s Concerts, an unbelievably popular series of concerts and lectures on music performed by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. He wrote that, “The Young People’s Concerts are among the favorite and most highly prized activities of my life…” Leonard Bernstein believed in the universality of music as a means of communicating. Music is “the way it makes you feel when you hear it…it names the feelings for us, only in notes, not in words.” Bernstein believed that anyone could and should enjoy music and was capable of musical appreciation. He felt that all children were natural musicians and that musical education was a necessity, not a privilege.
These concerts were so wildly popular in their day, that parents would put their children’s names down for seats to the concert waiting list the day they were born. Many of the concerts have been recently re-released on DVD and are available at the Cary Library. When viewed by my children recently I was interested to see if Bernstein would connect to this new generation. His frequent references to rockets and Sputnik that were meant to make him more accessible to his audience then almost painfully date his script now. However, the retro feel and his high energy kept the children long enough for them to observe something else. One child picked up the remote and put the sound up; what they heard was that the microphone in Bernstein’s tie had inadvertently picked up him humming along to Beethoven as he was conducting—and admittedly a little off key. For some reason, the children loved this. His joy in the music enthused his every pore; his love of the music was captivating. This new generation was able to overlook the dated colloquialisms and share Bernstein’s passion for music because it was genuine, not patronizing.
As conductor of the New York Philharmonic from the 1958 through the 1964 season, Bernstein began an experiment in audience communication. The Thursday Previews were informal concerts in which Bernstein would take the opportunity to interact with the audience to enlighten and inform them about the music. This use of the concert hall to educate and inform, and to interact with the audience would become the “Pre-concert Talk” given in concert halls across the world today.
We in Lexington are truly fortunate to have a great orchestra in the Lexington Symphony. We are twice blessed to have a conductor and Music Director, Jonathan McPhee, who is also the conductor of the Boston Ballet, and one of the most entertaining and educative speakers to be found on the music scene. He will be giving his own pre-concert talk at the concert on the 15th, in which he will share stories from his work with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins. It will also include background on the program and musical excerpts to listen for in the concert. The concert will feature a selection of music that will be accessible to children, but if Maestro Bernstein were here to ask, he would say all music is accessible to everyone; you just have to listen.
