We’ve previously written about one in all Leonard Bernstein’s main works, The Unanswered Question, the staggering six-part lecture that the multi-disciplinary artist gave as a part of his duties as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton Professionalfessor. Over 11 hours, Bernstein makes an attempt to elucidate the whither and the whence of music history, notably at a time when Classical music had come to a kind of crisis level of atonality and anti-music, however was nonetheless pre-Merzbow.
However, as Bernstein mentioned “…one of the best ways to ‘know’ a factor is within the contextual content of another discipline,” and these six lectures usher in all kinds of contexts, especially Chomsky’s linguistic theory, phonology, semantics, and extra. And he does all of it with frequent journeys to the piano to make some extent, or conveying in a complete orchestra—which Bernstein stored in his again pocket for instances identical to this.
Joking apart, that is nonetheless a significant scholarly work that has plenty inside to debate. That’s pertinent a half a century after the actual fact, especially when a lot music feels prefer it has stopped advancing, simply recycling.
The above clip is simply one of many gems to be discovered among the many lectures, somefactor that one viewer discovered so stunning they reported it off the television display and put uped to YouTube.
Within the clip, Bernstein makes use of the melody of “Fair Harvard,” often known as “Consider Me, If All These Endearing Younger Charms” by Thomas Moore—recognizable to the younger’uns because the fiddle intro to “Come On, Eileen”—as a begining level. He assumes a prehistoric hominid humming the tune, then the youthful and/or feminine members of the tribe singing alongside an octave aside.
From this second of musical and human evolution, Bernstein brings within the fifth interval—only some million years later—after which the fourth. Then polyphony is born out of that and…effectively, we don’t wish to spoil eachfactor. Quickly Bernstein brings us as much as the circle of fifths, compressing them into the 12 tones of the dimensions, after which 12 keys.
Bernstein can hear the potential for chaos, however, within the possibilities of “chromatic goulash,” and so ends with Bach, the master of “tonal control” who balanced the chromatic (which makes use of notes outaspect a key’s scale) with the diatonic (which doesn’t). (All of it comes again to Bach, doesn’t it?)
And there the video ends, however you already know the place to search out the rest. And lastly we’ll depart you with this other, more explosive, rendering of “Fair Harvard.”
Observe: An earlier version of this put up appeared on our website in 2018.
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Ted Mills is a freelance author on the humanities who curleasely hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can even follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, learn his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his movies here.