[1][2] During his year as visiting professor at Harvard University, Leonard Bernstein had various duties, such as being in residence and advising students, but historically the most significant of these was to deliver a series of lectures.
Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse.
"[3] Second, Bernstein had accepted commissions in addition to the Norton Lectures, including those of Dybbuk and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which distracted him greatly from his work at Harvard.
With the help of Mary Ahern, Thomas Cothran, and members of the Harvard Staff, Bernstein finally completed the script by October 1973.
[4] His desire to share with his own generation as well as future ones seems to have been the impetus for meticulously filming these lectures, which otherwise could not have been broadcast on television or sold on videocassette.
[5] Kraut organized a dissemination strategy that included all possible formats: the published lecture transcripts, the television airing, and the videocassettes.
He justifies this interdisciplinary strategy by saying that "...the best way to 'know' a thing is in the context of another discipline", a lesson he proudly attributes to his days as a Harvard student.
By the time he gave the lectures, however, he was more optimistic about the future of music, with the rise of minimalism and neoromanticism as predominantly tonal styles.
He credits this to eclecticism, which he argues is a superb twentieth century innovation and an ideal direction for music to take into the future.
Here he introduces the balance between diatonicism and chromaticism, diatonic notes being those found lower in the harmonic series of the specific key area.
Polygenesis, in contrast, states that languages spontaneously arose in different places at once, which seems to be closer to Bernstein's hypotheses for musical origin.
In addition to syntax, lecture 2 relies on Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, which states that innate mental processes take place to transform sounds and words into meaningful structures.
Grammar is a key aspect in this process, because through the use of underlying grammatical rules, the mind is capable of combining phonemes into syntax.
To demonstrate the innovations transformational grammar has provided linguistics, Bernstein diagrams the sentence "Jack loves Jill" (p. 67).
This musical prose is constructed out of the "underlying strings", which include "melodic motives and phrases, chordal progressions, rhythmic figures, etc".
Beethoven's sixth symphony represents a semantic ambiguity, because it could mean either the musical notes performed or the extramusical associations of a pastoral (pp. 199–201).
In part 2 of this lecture, Bernstein examines Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in terms of its similarities to and increase of ambiguity from Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette.
Bernstein indicates that the phonological transformation, or the extreme chromaticism of Tristan, is at a breaking point for tonality, so part 3 examines the next step in twentieth-century ambiguity: atonality.
Similar to the serial passages in his own third symphony and his admiration of Ives' The Unanswered Question, Bernstein's lauding of these works stems not from the use of atonality, but the presence of tonality.
As long as the composer is working within the Western Music tradition of twelve notes per octave, tonal relationships still exist.
He used free dissonance and rhythmic complexities to enliven tonality after it had reached the chromatic brink of collapse at the hands of Mahler and Debussy.
Stravinsky's semantic ambiguity arises from his objective treatment of styles outside of his direct life experience and training as a composer.
Paul Laird summarizes the lectures and their criticism concisely: "Bernstein's major argument concerned the continued importance of tonality in contemporary music, which he defended tenaciously.
"[10] Michael Steinberg followed up at the end of the lecture series with an article in The New York Times lauding Bernstein's rhetorical skills, but chastising the musical contributions.
He comments that the lectures "cannot be considered a well-conceived or rigorous contribution to this kind of interdisciplinary study", but he wants to continue the conversation about possible benefits of a linguistic-inspired analysis of music.
[8] Finally, Shiry Rashkovsky picked up the linguistic connection debate in 2012, focusing on Bernstein's self-declared "quasi-scientific" approach.
Keiler designated this topic the "old issue of serialism verses tonality", although he does give Bernstein credit for bringing to it a fresh perspective.
[8] A different type of reaction to Bernstein's lectures can be found in a more recent article by Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times, which seeks to explain twelve-tone technique.
Due to Bernstein's innovative dissemination of information, these lectures became much more widespread than those of any former Charles Eliot Norton visiting professor at Harvard.
These lectures serve as important landmarks in Bernstein's career, the twentieth century dispute about tonality, and pedagogy for the masses, but relatively little information has been written about them.