The Unanswered Question (1973)
Film:
DVD:

Lectures Written and Conducted by Leonard Bernstein

Anamorphic: N/A, appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Rent It.

The contents of this set were delivered in 1973 as a series of six weekly lectures by Leonard Bernstein when he was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Throughout this series, Bernstein has a singluar quest in mind, though taking many roads to try and reach his goal. He seeks the answer to the question of the title, "Whither Music?", posed by Charles Ives. The title of the series comes from Ives' composition, which is one of the many musical bits featured over the run of the set. He explores the question and many other sub-questions of it, over the course of a grueling 13 hours.

Now...just because something is grueling does not mean it is not moderately enjoyable or insightful. The first three lectures, Bernstein sets the groundwork for what is to come by applying linguistic ideas to music. In the first one, "Musical Phonology," Bernstein talks about the basic rudimentary bits that make up music, much as phonemes make up speech. His postulations about the creation of meaningful phonemes seem so simple to be almost ridiculous, such as his example of how the root word for mother, "Ma", came about. But once he ties his idea of a primary proto-language into several modern languages from all over the world, he begins to get onto something.

And that's the way it goes, especially for these first three lectures. "Oh, that's silly, that couldn't be--hey." The only break in this streak--indeed the only time that his theories and arguments fall apart, really--are in the second lecture on "Musical Syntax," where he relies heavily on the work of Noam Chomsky. Not to belabor the point, but Chomsky has apparently an idea of a universal grammar. The question is asked, how does a child of two and a half years know how to structure the sentence: "I like green ice cream"? How do they know that the verb goes after the subject and so forth and so on? Chomsky's idea of universal grammar states that there's something inherent in humans that no matter what language they grow up speaking, they simply know how to do this from jump. However, the measly webmaster with the English degree knows full well that the reason is that kids have spent two and a half years listening to their parents and others around them structuring sentences properly and have learned by example. Furthermore, the idea of universal grammar would hold a little more agua if kids at the age of 2.5 were structuring sentences perfectly, or even nearly perfectly, but they simply don't. Since the second lecture rests squarely on Chomsky's back, it's the weakest of the six since it's based on a very weak premise.

As the lectures progress, Bernstein builds upon things that have gone before--he's constantly referring to previous concepts. I was watching this and paying dead-on attention to everything, I can only imagine how it must have felt for people attending one lecture and then having to recall everything a week later. As the set continues, the farther you go, the more difficult the ideas become, the more ingrained in musicology they become, but the more fascinating. I compare it to reading something like James Gleick's Chaos or Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media--you understand two words in every five, but it still works.

Lecture four, "The Delights and Dangers in Ambiguity," covers the idea of musical ambiguity in various works, including such composers as Berlioz and Debussy. Lecture five, "The Twentieth Century Crisis," in which Bernstein outlines the rift between tonality and atonality as methods for composing, does not really live up to its title. It seems more like a "Twentieth Century Difference of Opinion" than anything else.

Lecture six is probably the most entertaining and the most moving, as Bernstein opens with a question of musical sincerity. He asks the question, "Is this music sincere?" while playing everything from Wagner to "You Really Got Me." And yes, on the latter, he does sing the words, while banging out chords on the piano. When he wraps up the series with the massive Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky, it's something else. As he admits, other questions have been asked and perhaps not answered, but to Ives Bernstein says "Yes."

This series is really for those who study music, pure and simple. Those outside the field can gain some insight and entertainment from it, but it's not for the faint of heart. Bernstein is quick to show up with diagrams of musical deep structures and play examples on the piano (most of them from memory, which makes my eight years of forgotten piano lessons rise up and smack me around). He's also good with interjecting just enough wit to keep the presentation from being utterly dry. If there's one distracting aspect of how the lectures were filmed, it's that Bernstein is lecturing in the round and being filmed. He spends 80% of his time talking directly to the camera, while the other 20% is looking at members of his audience. It looks almost furtive, as though he can't make up his mind where he's supposed to be looking. They should have let him do the entire thing looking straight on, because otherwise it just looks like he's making a mistake.

The set itself has no bonus features, per se, since the orchestral performances are included with the original series of lectures. It is complete in itself, but you know me--there's always more I would like. It would have been nice to have an interview included with the set, of Bernstein sometime before his death in 1990, reflecting on the lectures. Did he still agree with everything he had stated in 1973? What has changed and why? That sort of thing.

This is a must have for any academic music department or library or for any hardcore Bernstein follower. At a suggested retail of around ninety dollars, it's pricey--but it's dense as all hell, and worth it to those who comprise its audience. For the rest of us, it's worth a rental--or a loan from the aforementioned institutions who might have it handy--but it's advisable to take it in small doses so as not to be overwhelmed.