Whither Bernstein?

ACCUSE LEONARD Bernstein of anything; you have to admit he is a great performer. He is one of the best conductors of our time, a popular composer, and surely the best known musician. A generation of amateur music lovers got their start with twelve years of nationally televised Young People's Concerts, and Bernstein is still just about the only conductor who can get prime network time for classical music. When he delivered the 1973 Norton Lectures, Harvard didn't have a theater large enough for the crowds of musicians and non-musicians who wanted to attend.

When Bernstein finally walked out onto the stage of the Harvard Square Theater, graduates of the Young People's Concerts must have felt right at home. There was the familiar piano, and there was the Teleprompter with the script for the evening. Only the orchestra was missing, and that turned up later in the form of filmed musical examples starring the Boston Symphony and the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by the Maestro himself. Later in the week, each lecture was redone in front of the television cameras and broadcast over local public television.

And now Columbia Masterworks has released the entire six-lecture series as a set of 17 records. They do so "with special pride," according to a squib on the back of the box. Columbia's promotion of the lectures has played heavily on Harvard's prestige, and on the prestige of Bernstein's predecessors in the Norton Poetry chair, who include Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and e.e. cummings, as well as such composers as Stravinsky, Sessions, and Hindemith.

The comparison is unfortunate. Bernstein's lectures are a deeply personal statement, infused with the conductor's considerable charm and delivered with humor and sincerity. But it is hard to avoid feeling deceived by Bernstein's performance. He is careless with words and with ideas, and in the end he is always willing to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of the grand gesture.

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 and comes up with a complete sentence, "cruel fate waltzes."

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 to cut.

Often Bernstein seems to be using linguistic terminology simply because he likes the sound of it. The word "syntactical" appears in his discussions of music at apparently arbitrary intervals, and usually seems to mean something like "important." And when the available jargon is not enough, Bernstein makes up his own, including such unlikely hybrids as "morphosemantics." The result is that much of what he says about linguistics is not so much wrong as it is just empty.

ANALOGIES BETWEEN music and language are intriguing, and when they are treated as metaphors they can even be useful. But Bernstein wants to prove a point, and he pushes his analogies too far. He believes that music is a universal language, not because, as third grade teachers explain, tempo markings are in Italian, but because all music shares certain structures in spite of the obvious variety in the music of different cultures.

In his quest for universality in music, Bernstein begins with monogenesis, the idea that all language evolved from a common origin. As a metaphor, monogenesis lies behind the Biblical Tower of Babel myth, and as a general principle it lies behind a century of serious philology, but it is not an idea with any scientific foundation--linguists believe the dozen or so major language families to be unrelated. Still, it reminds Bernstein of a discovery he made when he was an undergraduate: the first four notes of Aaron Copland's Piano Variations rearranged and transposed in various ways turn up in all kinds of music, both Western and non-Western. A four note tune may seem to be a weak and superficial thread with which to bind music of different cultures, but it's the kind of thread Bernstein likes. A considerable amount of musical analysis in subsequent lectures is based on just this sort of tune-hunting.

BERNSTEIN CONTINUES his search for universality with a discussion of transformational grammar, a field which has become the dominant area of study of American linguistics in the ten years since it sprang fully-clothed from the brow of Noam Chomsky. Contemporary linguistics, focusing on syntax, aims at uncovering the structures underlying language. And this is the source of the universality that Bernstein finds so attractive--beneath their surface differences, Chomsky believes, languages are organized on a few simple and universal principles.

Traditional phrase structure grammar analyzed sentences independent of their relation to other sentences: for example, a passive sentence like "Max was crushed by the safe" would be parsed into subject-verb-prepositional phrase. Chomsky's contribution was to recognize that the same, easily described relationship between that sentence and its active counterpart, "The safe crushed Max," exists between countless other pairs of sentences. He conceived of "transformations" as simple devices to describe the relations between simple sentences like "The safe crushed Max" and complex ones like "Max was crushed by the safe," "What the safe did was crush Max," and so on. Chomsky also imagined that those transformations were part of the internal grammar of every speaker, actually used in producing and understanding sentences, but most linguists today ignore that aspect of his theory. Transformational grammar is generally treated as an abstract model of a language's syntax.

Chomsky also believed that features of transformational theory that were found in every language--linguistics universals--would necessarily be innate, biological structures. Again, in the context of contemporary linguistic theory this is an eccentric view, but it is the view Bernstein has grabbed onto--he sees transformational grammar as a "subconscious process," innate and not learned.

Bernstein wants to suggest that these same processes are at work in music, "transforming" basic musical material into its complex "surface" form. This is an appealing thought. Reiteration and variation of thematic material is certainly a fundamental principle of Western music, and poetry as well. If Bernstein could demonstrate an affinity between the mechanisms of musical variation and of transformation in language, he would be making a real contribution to aesthetic theory.

BUT THIS IS one rabbit that never gets pulled out of the hat. Bernstein derails himself right at the start with his gross misuse of syntactic terminology. When he applies such transformations as "conjoining," "transposition," "embedding," and even "deletion," to music, he does so without regard to their linguistic meaning. The musical transformations share only the names with their counterparts in language.

And when he throws in all of the devices of classical rhetoric, from alliteration to auxesis, he has left linguistics somewhere back in the dust. His claim that every note in the first movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony can be derived from the first two bars is unassailable, but it is also vacuous. With all of the "transformations" at his disposal he could just as easily derive all of Western music from those same two bars.

But Bernstein is a musician, after all, and when he talks about music without all the linguistic dross he is both entertaining and instructive, as he was during ten years of Young People's Concerts. There is nothing new for musicians in his analysis of Mozart's G minor symphony, Beethoven's Sixth and music of Berlioz and Wagner, but from the point of view of the layman he covers a lot of ground in a palatable way.

His occasional forays into literature are also, occasionally, rewarding--his discussion of asymmetry and ambiguity, for example. But here, too, linguistic analogies often lead him astray. There is something crudely reductionist about his view of poetry as prose dressed up by poetic transformations, and his claim that the sound structure ("phonology") of poetry works against structure and meaning ("syntax" and "semantics") ignores the work of linguists and literary critics alike.

WHEN BERNSTEIN'S survey of Western music arrives at the 20th century, his emphasis on innateness and universality suddenly takes on new significance. The 19th century ended "with a life-and-death crisis lurking around the corner." Mahler's Ninth Symphony, a great song of death, is the last, barely tonal expression of a bloated Romanticism dying of its own weight. The new century will have to face the disintegration of tonality, a process which began nearly a hundred years earlier with the Beethoven of the Gross Fuge and the last piano sonatas.

This crisis, according to Bernstein, divided modern composers into two warring camps "the way a great river divides into two forks." The Viennese school, led by Arnold Schoenberg, "gave up the struggle to preserve tonality;" Igor Stravinsky and his followers represented a "last ditch stand" against "the rampages of chromaticism." Bernstein's language gives the lie to his pose of dispassionate neutrality, and for that matter his own music plainly shows both his distaste for atonality and his adoration of Stravinsky.

Whither music? The final, triumphant answer is "yes," by which Bernstein means "tonality." He believes that his preference for tonality is more than a matter of his personal taste, that it is an innate, physical necessity. The very existence of the Viennese school's atonal music, not to mention non-tonal music of other cultures and the pre-tonal music of the Renaissance, argues that tonality is not universal, but Bernstein claims that Schoenberg denied his own inner instincts, and, outrageously, that "Schoenberg to this day has not found his public."

RECALLING HIS explanation in the first lecture of the harmonic series he says that tonality is based on immutable physical laws. It's true that some of the essential structures of Western music are to be found in the overtone series. Values of consonance and dissonance and some tonal relationships are facts of nature and not arbitrary cultural conventions. But the harmonic series doesn't explain the development of tonality, a complex system of relationships and progressions of tension and release, stability and instability--embodying all of the conventions of Western harmony. Above all, tonality involves a central, tonic note which is felt to be predominant. It was this aspect, with all its consequences that Schoenberg's system of 12 equal tones rebelled against.

Bernstein, who knows better, often finds tonality where there is none. According to him, the strings in Ives' Unanswered Question play nothing but "pure tonal triads" in C major. What he doesn't say is that the final chord is unresolved, because he wants to claim that "eternal, immortal tonality" is the answer to the solo trumpet's question, which Ives, after all, meant to be unanswered.

And later, listing contemporary composers who have been thrown back on their "innate, long denied sense of tonality," he says that Stockhausen's Stimmung "spends seventy minutes in B-flat major." In fact, Stimmung is a radically minimalist work consisting of six vocalists humming and chanting a low B-flat fundamental and its various overtones--seventy minutes of some kind of B-flat chord, but not the key of B-flat major by anybody's definition, and certainly not anything resembling tonality.

BERNSTEIN'S CASE for Stravinsky is eloquent and convincing. He quotes Theodor Adorno, a dogmatic advocate of Schoenberg who accused Stravinsky of hiding behind an insincere mask of eclecticism. Bernstein defends the neoclassical mask as a reaction to the extreme subjectivity of overblown Romanticism and draws interesting parallels to the poetry of T.S. Eliot. But here, too, his polemic dislike of Schoenberg leads him to inaccuracy and self-contradiction. Having accused the serialists of mechanically turning out music that is "form without content," he now condemns them for discarding the order imposed by diatonicism. Stravinsky's "great save," neoclassicism, is "the concept that could finally impose some aesthetic order on this modernist chaos."

Schoenberg once said that his music wasn't modern, it was just badly played. That is no longer generally true, but it applies to Bernstein's misrepresentation of him. The most convincing argument for Stravinsky on these records is Bernstein's new recording of Oedipus Rex, a neoclassic masterpiece, while Schoenberg is represented only by an excerpt from the Op. 23 piano pieces and a few bars of Pierrot Lunaire--Bernstein hammers out the flute part with one hand and growls the sprechstimme two octaves lower.

In the end, Bernstein's treatment of Schoenberg suffers from the same dogmatism he criticizes in Adorno. His failure is a failure to listen to the music on its own terms. He imposes his tonal expectations on works that have a different internal logic. He points triumphantly to the Bach chorale quoted at the end of Berg's Violin Concerto, without recognizing it as a historical allusion like those he found in Stravinsky and Eliot. Berg used tonal devices frequently for certain kinds of effects, but rarely as a basic principle of his music.

Aesthetic theory has found no way to distinguish between the mediocre and the great, no way to tell us what is art. That, finally, is the unanswered question. Bernstein speaks well on Stravinsky's behalf, but the proof is in his conducting. And no amount of pseudoscientific analysis will prove Schoenberg wrong. His music speaks for itself.