Leonard Bernstein An American Musician by Allen Shawn

We could use a Leonard Bernstein today, if only to do Young People's Concerts, of which Bernstein did fifty-three from 1958 to 1972, all of which were televised.  Several of these concerts were shown on Turner Classic Movies recently, as well as several Omnibus shows on which he appeared, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth.  These shows were not condescending but reveled in the complexities and beauties of music, from jazz to Broadway to classical.  We have taken our children to LOS (Little Orchestra Society) Kids and to Bruce Adolphe's Meet the Music concerts and we have enjoyed them, but they seem to shy away from the intricacies of the history of melody and counterpoint, the kind of thing that Bernstein could explain so well.  As Shawn says:  "to talk about music rivetingly to those who have no training in it, while also teaching and inspiring those with more knowledge, and all the while not falsifying the music itself, was a great accomplishment." (Yale University Press, 2014).

When I go to a classical concert or an opera these days I see a sea of grey heads.  Music should be a requirement of all schooling, as it was for me at Columbia and my son at Stuyvesant, very much exceptions these days when everyone is too busy taking reading and math tests.  Of course one cannot make money by learning about music but it can certainly enhance one's enjoyment of life.  Music was Bernstein's life and though, as Shawn suggests, he might have spread himself too thin by composing and conducting, by working for films (he did the music for Elia Kazan's On the  Waterfront, 1954) and doing ballets (Fancy Free, choreographed in 1944 by Jerome Robbins) and theatre (West Side Story, 1957) as well as concert works and masses, his work was never meretricious and Bernstein never neglected his rigorous approach to conducting.