Norton Poetry

This is the last and also the longest of Mr. Bernstein's lectures in this cycle. He presents us with "sincerity" in music and whether the examples he plays are sincere or not and reminds us of Theodore Adorno's theory on the compositional dichotomy in the persons of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. For Adorno the latter is "a child of satan" full of heart-up-his-sleeve forms of expression, vacuous; in other words: artificial. Whereas Schoenberg represents the saintly, objective and direct expression of feelings; i.e. what is ART and what is ARTIFICIAL. How artificial can art be and still be art?

At the beginning of his first Norton Lecture, Leonard Bernstein explained the importance of "inter-disciplinary values - that the best way to 'know' a thing is in the context of another discipline." In these six lectures, Bernstein communicated his ideas of the universality of musical language through wide-ranging analogies to linguistics, aesthetic philosophy, acoustics as well as music history. However, while many of his ideas are intellectually challenging, the great achievement of the lectures is that through their breadth they make complex musical concepts accessible to a general audience.

Continuing with with my previous video upload, here is the 2nd Lecture pronounced at Harvard in 1973 by Leonard Bernstein as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry during his tenure from 1971 onwards.