I want to announce to everybody that now is possible to broadcast this lecture with English and Spanish subtitles made by me. May you enjoy and share it! /// Quisiera anunciar que es posible ver esta clase magistral con subtítulos en inglés y español hechos por mi. ¡Que lo disfruten y compártanlo!
9 лет назад
+martinciro Muchas Gracias!... los otros capitulos son posibles conseguirlos subtitulados al español también? Gracias!!
Hola Manuel! Es un gusto que mi trabajo haya contribuído a la compresión de estas clases magistrales por el genial Leonard Bernstein. Por el momento no he tenido tiempo de elaborar subtítulos para los otros capítulos. Recuerdo que me tomó alrededor de 2 semanas a tiempo completo todo el trabajo de transcripción, investigación, y adaptación/sincronización de subtítulos. Espero en algún momento tener tiempo para retomar este fascinante ciclo de conferencias. Saludos desde México.
I love how he unabashedly and unironically cites the works of the Beatles. I think he really did love the Revolver record especially. He mentions Eleanor Rigby, for example. I've read that his favorite Beatles song was 'Good Day Sunshine.' An academic with a wide open mind. Total respect for that alone. Great art is great art whether it's a studied academic discipline or not. Always loved these lectures. LB was a musician's musician.
We used to have a witch of a music dept. head at my local community college who hated the Beatles. I also knew an RPM radio dj who also disliked the Beatles. I don't trust anyone who hates the Beatles!
this is what music television MTV could be. 24/7 music from all time periods and styles interspersed with speakers like Bernstein who can give context and deeper meaning to what we're hearing.
Exactly ! And musicians giving reviews of new gear and those musician tutorials (probably after midnight with this stuff). BUT: Just like we learned with G4TV, if a TV network doesn't make money, they'll run reruns of "Cops" and their ratings will climb and the good stuff, that doesn't sell so well, will die on the vine.
You can understand how much Bernstein loved that passage from Beethoven 9, even before this, because in his "Mass" (1971) he uses this 12-tone passage (11-tone actually) as a theme with variations, constituting the 2nd Meditation. It can also be heard in the beginning of the "Fraction".
Watching a few of these mind-blowing lectures last night, I had almost an Epiphany, when Mr. Bernstein talked about the crisis and dilemma of European music, as the tonality was on the brink of sacrifice: It just struck me, how exactly the same development and fate was subsequently repeated in the history of jazz. This is a very interesting fact, that Mr. Bernstein could easily have appended a full lecture on. Jazz has basically been through all the same phases as classical music.
Not just art, engineering, big war machines have gotten so big that if one is destroyed, you've taken a bigger blow than the people you used your machine one. Technology of all kinds. Maybe this is just some sort of entropy that progress of anything we create will follow, where it'll reach a point of perfecting teaditions and pushing them to the brink of their capabilities and then completely dismantling them for the sake of wanting something fresh.
A genius! This lecture is a legacy to the history of music in the futere! Spotlights: 57:42 - Chromatism in Beethoven's Ninth 1:02:00 - Atonality in Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony
The Cold War political backdrop in the world at the time hovers over these lectures like the grim reaper ready to take its victim at any time. Even in the midst of the fear and anxiety of the unknown fate of the world and human kind, it could be seen as a brave action to create these lectures. Intellect and art can indirectly counter even the most destructive of human actions.
BTW, the B minor fugue (the last) in Book 1 of the Well Tempered Clavier of Bach has another almost tone row. It begins with a descending minor triad and continues with a series of semitone appoggiaturas, ascending and descending. It is also richly emotional. Every pianist should learn it.
It's nice to watch these lectures posted so well in such relative high fidelity compared to my "excerpts".My analogue tapes are worn out and recorded camera watching TV. I have and continue to send interested parties to your channel . Thank you for posting these Lectures in their entirety ! You do us all a great service .
paxwallacejazz thank you for the nice comment and informing others about these lectures. I hope it helps to many for widening their perspective of music history. enjoy! best!
My goodness, this one gets heavy. Also, just so I'm not the only one hearing it, the repeating motif in that Mahler piece sounds like I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas.
1:04:53 well. I was not alive in 1973, but I can say now in 2017 that I love to listen to Schoenberg's music. It may sound not honest, but it is true. I have listened to hours and more hours of his music, Variations for Orchestra, String Quartet No.4, Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto... aaaah the Violin Concerto with that surprising ending gives me real pleasure. I listen to very simple tonal music and to Schoenberg's music and I don't think it's contradictory. Also, I always find lot of people in the comments section of Schoenberg's videos that love his music too.
What do you like about Schoenberg's music? I've been struggling for a long time to appreciate it, but I never seem to fully grasp what the point of it is. Every time I listen it seems hopelessly random, arbitrary, and purposeless. How does one appreciate what sounds like a soup of random notes?
@@Frankly7 it's hard to explain something so subjective, but I need to try, because i don't like when people just say "it's subjective", so I don't want to be that person xD It's a very different kind of pleasure than what I would feel listening to Bach or Ravel, but Bach and Ravel are very different from each other too. The kind of pleasure from Bach is like seeing the most well structured clockworky thing. Everything is so correctly in place and everything fits so well even when it seems it wouldn't fit, so it looks like magic. Ravel on the other hand is a completely different kind of pleasure, it's like I'm on a very odd and hyperbolic dream, full of colorful characters and deep deep DEEP emotions. It's as if I'm being fed with thousands of ancient memories all condensed at the same time and I never know where it goes, so it's always surprising. Schoenberg is different, a very different kind of pleasure, and oddly it's like a mixture of Ravel and Bach. It's like very distorted and broken dream but deeply organized in a clockworky manner. It's painfully dense, therefore it can be easy to lose it, while a Bach piece would require good attention throughout, while Ravel requires you to be able lose yourself, Schoenberg requires both things at the same time. In each new second you need to lose yourself and then rapidly go back to give attention to the next second so you can feel lost again in that second "memory". I don't know if this is how Schoenberg intended his music to be heard and felt, but this is how I feel it. Also, it's so ITCHY. It's addicting for me. So moments in the Piano Concerto op.42 I feel like my M-SPOT (like the g-spot but for music)
@@MaemiNoYume I can't tell you why I love Schoenberg any more than I can tell you why I like Bach or Mahler. The problem is that Schoenberg is analyzed more than he is listened to.
43:30 the humorous objectivity with which he compares himself to other composers of the time is kinda weird. I mean one cannot argue with the fact that he is one of the most important musicians of the 20th Century, but it’s insane to think that he just objectively accepts it and keeps going without giving it a second thought. He doesn’t care! Fucking love bernsteinnnnnnnn
1:07:30 - Very appropriate that he chose to talk about the Berg Violin Concerto on this lecture. This piece is filled with complexities but yet it all works itself out beautifully. The challenge for the violinist, and even the orchestra is how to make sense of all the dissonant, awkward passagework framed by a handful of ravishingly beautiful passages. And then comes the end - sweet death and ascension into Heaven (literally, this concerto was about death) with, OF ALL THINGS, Berg quoting (appropriating?) a Bach chorale excerpt. Although not mentioned specifically by Bernstein, Alban Berg was one of the Second Viennese School of composers - Berg, Schoenberg, Webern.
A genesis as simple blues, further developing into Swing, and maturing harmonically and otherwise as Bebop, continuing into a modal form, and further into free jazz. Each style can easily be mapped to corresponding main styles of classical music: Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Romantism, Impressionism and Atonal music. But furthermore, what makes it particularly interesting in the light of Bernstein's lecture, is that the birth of Jazz as a virginal fresh musical art form, coincides with the
crisis or even death, depending on your views, of classical music. In other words, from the universal and philosophical point of view of Mr. Bernstein, jazz can almost be seen as the sequel to classical music, as a reincarnation of musical Geist and purity in music. The really interesting thing here, is that jazz doesn't simply build on the experience of classical music, inheriting all its maladies - but, in fact, starts afresh with a 'naive' , pure and fresh start. This is really fascinating.
He certainly knew how to finish a lecture. Those final reluctant strings, each of which less audible leading to the final acceptance, followed by the silent rolling of credits. Genius, both him a Mahler.
It’s amazing how this struggle between tonality and a tonality was not resolved by creative genius or monumental artistic works, but was instead resolved by the raising up of generations of people who neither understood the issues nor cared one way or the other about their resolution. The triumph of people without culture.
Here to remind you to come back to these, I'm in my final year of a Composition Degree and the first time I listened to these I was a high schooler. It's incredible how much more I've gotten out of it coming back all these years later. :)
@cagin Hey! I've found out your video by chance and I'd like to contribute with subtitles I made some years ago (for this 5th part) and I think they are pretty accurate (anyway, corrections are more than welcome). It's for both in English/Spanish. Write me back if you're interested. Regards from Mexico, Martin Gonzalez
Thank you so much, for posting this! I read the book of this series more than 20 years ago (in German), and can now follow the original - this is fantastic!
This one is just phenomenal, even better than the 3rd one. The first half-hour is simply a wonderful introduction to early 20th century music and musical issues. Of course, dividing the octave in 12 is just as arbitrary as anything else, bur he does get the point across that as long as you have *notes* (where stable and perceivable pitch is central), you'll have a relation to tonality somewhere. So true, and so important to remind. Also: unexpected leather boots visible around 1:12:00. Cooool.
To anyone how's interested, Shoenberg didn't introduce Sprechstimme in Pierrot Lunaire but in the penultimate section of Gurrie-Lieder Herr Gänsefuss, Frau Gänsekraut
Me parece todo un personaje Leonard Bernstein, con muchas cualidades hacia la musica, las obras que dirige se ven muy dedicado. Me gusto por que tiene una versatilidad en lo que hace
I love these lectures, for the same reasons I love Lenny's Young Peoples' Concerts. I would argue Bernstein was an even better critic, and commentator on music than he was a conductor.
You would think that the admiration for Schoenberg that Bernstein expresses here would have translated into performances and recordings, but alas, it did not.
@@Zurvanox Spending so much time talking about how great a composer him and then not programming him keeps the public from having a chance to experience the greatness. A conductor's job isn't to tailor programming to marketing. Bernstein worked in an era where orchestras had so much funding from rich contributors that box office revenue didn't really matter.
@@charlesreidy2765the public will never be able to experience the greatness of this music because the public is cattle. They can listen to it a hundred times and they still won't be able to comprehend or enjoy such complex music. Schoenberg himself said that if it's art, it's not for everybody, and if it's for everybody, it's not art.
39:00 if you like this stuff and are looking for atonality and 12-tone galore, listen to the music of Maurice Ohana, particularly his 12 Etudes for piano. It's here on RU-vid. Ohana was a rather obscure composer, but not totally unknown. Basically, if you have exhausted Stravinsky's piano music and want something else that is similar, listen to Ohana (1913-1994.)
The performance of The Unanswered Question is not prefaced by the title The Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. I think those performances were bought and paid for. This was added and clearly involves Boston Symphony players, but without Bernstein conducting - else why not show him? They paid for the players, but not for the whole orchestra. There probably was another conductor, kept carefully off-camera. If you want to see Bernstein himself conduct the piece, see the Young People's Concert Charles Ives: American Pioneer. It is odd that he plays a DG record of the Berg Violin Concerto, rather than his own Columbia version. Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were rarely conducted by Bernstein, but like von Karajan he did a few of their pieces. Once was usually enough for him.
It doesn't matter how many times you split the octave. All tones are bound to the gravity of a tonal framework. Atonal music would have no tones, which is essentially impossible. The question is weather those tones are harmonious or not.
Atonal music is nonsense, yet you aren't right either. It is possible to extend tonality beyond 12 notes and not by "dividing the octave" as you say which by the way for the 12 tones is not a geometric division, they sit on an exponential curve, not a linear one which is obvious due to the fact that each octave is a doubling in frequency. And making more than 12 tones by using the natural harmonic series is possible, YES. If you look at the harmonic series of C, the 7th harmonic Bb is already 31% below equal temperament and the 11th hamonic is 49% below Gb. These low harmonics notes are discarded by the 12 notes equal temperament yet they are importants. The 12 notes are the result of favoring the interval of the fifth which is illustrated by the circle of fifth that covers all 12 tones before starting over. By adding those two notes we have 14 notes and it's not longer an equal temperament, but yet all the tonal world is still there since we didn't suppress the present 12 notes only added two more notes inside the octave. Let's call them do do# re re# mi fa fe fa# sol sol# la la# le si. Now there's of course a problem with this, as it's only for one key, the key of C. But look at the pitch of these extra notes fe and le. They can be placed right in between existing notes to create a new equal temperament of 24 notes effectively doubling the number of notes in the octave and allowing modulation. The disadvantage is of course playability on an instrument with twice as many pitches. Actually only here is the real breakthrough. This system already exist in vocal music and many regional traditional music creates those notes by various transitory effects that fixed pitch instrument cannot create. I would cite only very old traditional Cambodian vocal music sang in the 1950 and 1960's. You will hear unheard harmonies in all the classical repertoire due to those added pitches. Those vocal songs were not written in score they were transmitted over generations by ear. So all that is left to do for composers is to find ways to notates those alterations that are not regular sharp or bemol and find an new instrument capable of playing them.
I believe it is possible to make atonal music work in a 12-tone system as long as there is a fallback of sorts onto a familiar system. For instance, take the electronic genre of breakcore/dnb. That music can completely work with atonal, illogical synth progressions, even if set in the 12 tone system. This was a very interesting listen.
@cagin Actually, I found the the harmony to be on the complex side (in terms of linear progressions), which is why I mention Schoenberg's "Harmonielehre" (theory of harmony). My opinion is that it does not sound as though it is born out of the inner ear as a point of origin and as such it stands in line with many faulty detours for 20th century music. Also, I think using "complex" as a fundamental criteria is flawed. Complexity as a primary goal is usually ill-fated.
Muchísimas gracias por poner los subtítulos en español. Estoy mirando los demás capítulos de la lista de reproducción y me gustaría saber si sería posible añadir los subtítulos. Gracias por compartir. De corazón, gracias.
Tenho muito prazer que vôce gostou o video. Subtítulos por este video foi fornecida pelo um utilizador do RU-vid. (Eu não falo lingua Espanhol) Se alguem fornecer legendas por outras videos de sequela, eu, com certeza, vou anexá-los. Obrigado pelo seu comentário e interesso.
@lesmizzle Technically what you say might be true, one can agree with you just by listening the piece. Still; IMHO, this movement has immense dept and expression and I think, in general, expression and power of a piece is not defined only by it's complexity in harmonic (or other) sense(s). And one should also consider that this is the final movement of a 4 movement symphony where the preceding movements are highly complex (especially the 1st movement which is highly regarded by Alban Berg)
Speaking from then perspective of an organist, all this is swell and great, and should not be soft pedaled. After all, if you're not swell, you certainly aren't great! Swell to great!
i thinks this is more due to the recording and mixing rather than the interpretation. it looks like the three ensembles have been recorded in different places and at different times
Actually, I would go forward and say that the only divisions of the octave in which tonality is not possible is in 2,3,4,6, and 8 tone equal temperaments. 13 tone equal temperament can sound very tonal, believe it or not.
@kratanuva725 well it's tonality of a sort. I use 8-TET quite frequently, and it's very pleasant at times. The rest are of course patterns that occur in 12-TET, so you have we have a bias against them, though Slonimsky has made some cool 2 tone music.
To suggest that Mahler foresaw all the horrors of the 20th century is reading too much into his music. The same is said of Kafka (though somewhat more aptly in his case)....
@lesmizzle let us not confuse opinion with fact. we are all, of course free to like or dislike a piece of music, however we must realize that these opinions are generated through our own experience and hold no "gravity" to use your word, for the rest of us. Tonal implications can be made while dividing the octave in anyway you please, it would be harder with just a division of two, but possible. Although we must realize that these implications are bound to be understood more or less by someone
In naming the prophesiers of the coming 20th century, proceeding Mahler, he didn't mention the greatest of them all: Nietzsche. But I can understand why Bernstein did what he did, Nietzsche's philosophy of the Ubermensh was adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, so maybe mentioning Nietzsche would have gotten too close to a still sensitive and raw area for him. Bernstein wasn't so objective as I thought after I watched his previous video. If I still believed in God, I would ask him to bless you, Leonard, for introducing me to Classical music.
Matthew Ward If you had watched the video right through you'd find that at the 1:27:17 mark he mentions certain 19th century people from different areas (e.g. psychology, philosophy), not just musicians, who foretold the coming problems of the 20th century. Btw, I meant "Preceding" not "Proceeding" in my earlier post.
Good point. I don't think that Bernstein would have been all that different from any professor (certainly not those that I've had)-scientific or non-scientific-when it comes to matters of personal politics shaping the course of a lecture. It's really up to intrepid students (who actually pay attention) to press them a bit. Expected and deserved on his part, most especially at an Ivy League school.
What amazed me while watching Bernstein's lectures was his ability to recite his speeches for like 2 hrs each (without drinking any water, and just having a small break in between) all from memory (it didn't look like he was using an autocue) . If I'm right, then it speaks volumes to either the discipline that classical music taught him or just his innate intelligence and concentration. Or maybe they just bred them tougher back then. It's good to hear that you went to university. I just went to high school. I'm not that smart, but I try.
The notion that tonality and atonality should be mutually exclusive seems forced. Schoenberg gave us a new way to discover musical ideas, but his constraints were his own just as every other composer defines the realms of his composition. The crisis is ultimately a matter of perspective. That said, it's not exactly easy to adopt the language. It takes incredible perseverance and passion to rediscover and maintain a composer's voice, right? This challenge has existed in every age hasn't it?
"Sit back and enjoy it" *plays music, whole room in absolute silence with no reaction whatsoever* Yeah nah, unenthusiastic contemplation is not for me.
@cnmaster01 I have actually changed my mind since I wrote that. Really, any of those tunings could be tonal like you say. This is a really cool song in 8-TET watch?v=HvDEoZ4LIdc
Gooscar okay, so I knew that when a 3rd party claims a video, they can monetize it and the uploaded won’t receive any revenue, but I had NO IDEA they’d take it this far!! There’s like 15 ads on this one vid. RU-vid is buggin
I've been struggling for a long time to appreciate Schoenberg's music, but I never seem to fully grasp what the point of it is. Every time I listen it seems hopelessly random, arbitrary, and purposeless. How does one appreciate what sounds like a soup of random notes? Why does the structure of the 12 tone system matter to the listener if the whole point is to remove discernible tonal structure in the first place?
Aside from your opinion you do seem to illustrate an acute ear. An ear that has completely written over flash compression of a loseless compression of VHS at best! A summery of your opinion (minus the ego of 'free speach' i.e. opinion) - "The Unanswered Question is one of my favorite pieces, I didn't like Leonard Bernstein's Performance of it"
