The Unanswered Question is a lecture series given by Leonard Bernstein in the fall of 1973. This series of six lectures was a component of Bernstein's duties as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry for the 1972/73 academic year at Harvard University, and is therefore often referred to as the Norton Lectures. The lectures were both recorded on video and printed as a book, titled The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard.*, includes three vinyl LPs
Background
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. This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. 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.
As the lectures were postponed from the spring semester of 1973 to the fall semester of the same year, Bernstein's visiting professorship lasted three semesters instead of the intended year. Several factors contributed to the postponement. First, having attended Harvard as an undergraduate himself – a point he stresses heavily in his first lecture – and following such renowned lecturers as Stravinsky, Copland, and Hindemith, the task at hand seemed monumental. His daughter, Jamie Bernstein, later recounted: "Ambitious? Oh, yes! Was he in over his head? Completely!" 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. And third, Humphrey Burton, Bernstein's leading biographer, adds Bernstein had too much fun pretending to be a student again. With the help of Mary Ahern, Thomas Cothran, and members of the Harvard Staff, Bernstein finally completed the script by October 1973.
Burton stresses that, by this point in his life, Bernstein wanted all of his work to be documented for pedagogical purposes. 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. Bernstein was, however, not alone in the arrangements to promote his career and legacy through these lectures. In 1971, Harry Kraut began working for Bernstein, taking responsibility for much of the business side accompanying Bernstein's career. Kraut organized a dissemination strategy that included all possible formats: the published lecture transcripts, the television airing, and the videocassettes. This strategy required extensive planning because the lectures were recorded off-site, at WGBH, immediately following the lecture at Harvard Square Theater. Most of the orchestral examples were recorded in advance, in December 1972, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Bernstein provided much of the funding for this elaborate project himself.
Linguistic context
Although these are lectures about music, Bernstein framed them as interdisciplinary, or as he says, "in the spirit of cross-disciplines" (p. 3). 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.
As the primary interdisciplinary subject, Bernstein chose the recent work of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's major contribution at the time was challenging structural linguistics, or structuralism, for failing to account for the ways in which sentences could be radically transformed while minimally changing meaning or how they could be minimally transformed while radically changing meaning. Chomsky advocated generative linguistics, which is characterized by a subconscious, finite set of rules that can account for all grammatically correct linguistic transformations. Chomsky argued that all humans possess an innate grammatical competence, which enables children to construct grammatically correct sentences they may have never previously heard.
Bernstein acknowledges Chomsky was not the only prominent linguist with new theories worth considering within the context of music, but he chose Chomsky because he was "the best-known, most revolutionary, and best-publicized name in the area" (p. 8).
Theoretical context
"The purpose of these six lectures is not so much to answer the question as to understand it, to redefine it. Even to guess at the answer to 'whither music?' we must first ask whence music? what music? and whose music?" (p. 5) Essentially, the purpose of this lecture series was to discuss the future of classical music.
His inspiration for the series' title came from Ives' 1908 work, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein interprets Ives' piece as posing the question, "whither music?" because of the tonal language and increasingly dissonant nature of music at the time it was written.
These lectures are a useful artifact for us to see one side of the music theory debate in the mid-twentieth century. This debate regarded the future of classical music and the roles both tonality and twelve-tone writing would take. Bernstein was disappointed with the trajectory of classical music in the 1960s, as atonality took more precedence. To examine how music got to this point, Bernstein argued that we have to understand "whence music". 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. Encouraged by the progress of tonality's resurgence, Bernstein, in essence, uses these lectures to argue in favor of continuing the tonal music system through eclecticism and neoclassicism.
Many composers in the mid-twentieth century converted from serialism to tonality and vice versa. Bernstein's compositions are rooted firmly in tonality, but he felt that, in order to be taken seriously, he had to draw on serial techniques. 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.
Content
To answer the question, "Whither music?" the first three lectures are based on the question, "Whence music?" These lectures provide background about the history of music, and most of the analogies to linguistics are created during these segments. With the deployment of the linguistic connections as the series progresses, the lectures begin to feature listening examples more prominently. This is especially evident in the increasing frequency of full movements, and the increasing length of the lectures. Lectures 4 and 5 discuss the current state of classical music through the lenses of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Lecture 6 discusses the potential future directions music can, and should, take.
Lecture 1, "Musical Phonology"
Phonology is the linguistic study of sounds, or phonemes. Bernstein's application of this term to music results in what he calls "musical phonology",
To describe musical phonology, Bernstein first explores monogenesis, the hypothesis of a single, common origin for all languages. Bernstein's linguistic example for this is the prevalence of the sound "AH" (p. 11). He makes a case for musical monogenesis through the use of the harmonic series.
Bernstein uses a low C as an example to show how a note contains overtones, or higher pitches that sound simultaneously. Using this concept, he relates the harmonic series to tonality in several ways. First, he notes the relationship of the fundamental pitch, in this case a C, and its second overtone, in this case a G (the first overtone is an octave). These pitches make up the tonic-dominant relationship fundamental to the system of tonal music. Continuing to identify the overtones, he points out that the fourth overtone, the next pitch whose class differs from that of the fundamental, is two octaves plus a major third above the fundamental. The overtones C, G, and E comprise a major triad. Moving on to later overtones, A (it's actually somewhere between a well-tempered A and B-flat, but A is the usual choice), he constructs a major pentatonic scale.
This scientific aspect of pitches, Bernstein says, makes music universal, or a "substantive universal" (p. 27). Although he still supports the idea of musical monogenesis, he identifies Chomsky's innate grammatical competence as a theory especially applicable to music.
Bernstein justifies the remaining notes of tonal music through the circle of fifths (p. 37). Here he introduces the balance between diatonicism and chromaticism, diatonic notes being those found lower in the harmonic series of the specific key area. The notes higher in the series add ambiguity, or expressiveness, but do so at the loss of clarity.
Bernstein uses Mozart's Symphony No. 40 to illustrate these harmonic implications. He points out several particularly chromatic passages before playing his recording of the piece with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
While his overview of the harmonic series is a thorough and understandable introduction for those unfamiliar with the concept, Bernstein distorts some of the intricacies slightly. His discussion of Non-Western music is rather limited in its understanding of non-tonal language. For instance, the use of a Balinese pentatonic scale for supporting evidence does not accurately reflect Balinese music. As Keiler points out, "there is absolutely no relationship of intervallic content between [the Balinese] scale and the overtone series." Finally, the term monogenesis is slightly misapplied. A common origin for all languages means that a single language emerged before populations spread, after which diversity among languages arose. 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. Arguing that the harmonic series is a universal truth, independently discovered by all musical cultures, would actually be polygenesis.
Lecture 2, "Musical Syntax"
Syntax refers to the study of the structural organization of a sentence, or as Bernstein summarizes, "the actual structures that arise from that phonological stuff" (p. 9). 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. The theory seeks to explain the transformational processes small units of language take to become larger 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. These resulting syntactic structures include linguistic material such as words, clauses, and sentences.
The transformational process can be represented by a transformation from deep structure to surface structure. Deep structure comprises underlying phonemes and word parts, while surface structure is the spoken sentence.
To demonstrate the innovations transformational grammar has provided linguistics, Bernstein diagrams the sentence "Jack loves Jill" (p. 67). The diagram shows the underlying processes transforming the bottom row, or deep structure, into the spoken words, or surface structure.
Although this transformation is innate, it requires many complex subtleties of language. Examples of transformational processes in language include passive transformation, negative transformation, interrogative transformation, and pronominal substitution.