Word: bernstein
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This, to hear Conductor Leonard Bernstein tell it, is what might be happening at a climactic moment during Richard Strauss's Don Quixote. Bernstein bawled this analysis from the podium at one of his current New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts. His point: music does not need verbal meanings assigned to it, and Don Quixote could as well be about Superman as about the "silly old man" on a "skinny, bony old horse...
This comic-strip exercise in esthetics is typical of the way Bernstein this season made the old Young People's series a bracing, fact-filled musical kindergarten for young and old. He wrote his own scripts for four televised, hour-long concerts (the last is due next month), using much the same technique as in the Omnibus music-appreciation series (TIME, Feb. 4, 1957). Teacher Bernstein combined, in equal parts, his musical knowledge, charm, eloquence...
Takata. For last week's program on "What Does Orchestration Mean?" Bernstein arrived at Carnegie Hall at 5:45 a.m. with his finished script to rehearse until the performance started at noon. During the concert, bouncy, boyish-looking Lecturer Bernstein roamed the stage with a microphone stuck in his jacket, sometimes sat down at the piano to dash off a musical example. Only occasionally did he indulge in cuteness, as when he spoke of "Grandfather Bassoon" and "Little Sister Piccolo," or explained that orchestration is like "putting clothes on notes...
...faced, jovial schoolmaster: hard work and solid teaching in the fundamentals of composition and literature. Marson scoffed at curve-grading (the clod-coddling marking system that is based on the class average), insisted that his boys measure up to definite levels. One bright boy who measured up: Composer Leonard Bernstein, who still talks of Marson's lectures on English poetry. Says a Boston Latin colleague of Marson: "Phil never pretended education was fun or that there was any substitute for hard work. He was the ideal secondary-school teacher...
...Such noted U.S. composers as Aaron Copland (The Heiress) and Leonard Bernstein (On the Waterfront) have written distinguished film music. Some composers have used films as the inspiration for music that has become part of the concert repertory, e.g., Sergei Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky and Lieutenant Kije, Virgil Thomson's Louisiana Story. *The others: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre, Louis Durey...