Word: bernsteins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...BERNSTEIN ENTITLED his lecture series "The Unanswered Question" after Charles Ives' short chamber work of that name. Ives meant his piece to ask "the perennial question of existence," and for Bernstein, that is "Whither Music?" Before we can deal with "whither," though, we need to know "whence," and Bernstein's first five lectures are devoted to tracing the origins of what he considers a twentieth century crisis in musical development...
...Bernstein claims to have something new to offer in his view of musical history, a new tool for aesthetic theory: linguistics. He suggests that scientific analysis should replace the "purple prose" of most musical discussion with a whole new discipline, "musicolinguistics," and that is where his troubles begin...
...Bernstein starts at the parlor game level, trying to find analogies between language and music. First he tries matching up sounds with tones, words with musical phrases, and so on. "I believe it's no accident that the German word satz means both sentence and symphonic movement." This seems a bit simplistic, though, so he tries again with parts of speech, equating nouns with motifs and adjectives with their harmonic underpinnings--Wagner's Fate motif played over a diminished chord could mean something like "cruel fate." Verbs naturally correspond to rhythm, so Bernstein adds some triple meter at the piano...
This sort of thing is pointless, but it's innocent enough, and Bernstein admits that these analogies are only "quasi-scientific." In later lectures, though, he seems to take them quite seriously--at one point he even calls a bar of Mozart that involves both rhythm and harmony a "participle," as if you could mix parts of speech the way you mix blue and yellow to get green...
This kind of recklessness with language characterizes the whole series. Bernstein has a curious difficulty in deciding what audience to address. He makes a careful effort to avoid bringing in too much musical esoterica--he occasionally calls time out to explain such things as diminished seventh chords and the harmonic series, and then apologizes, saying "But you knew all that." But when he talks about linguistics the Young People's Concert atmosphere disappears and the jargon rolls in thick enough...