Unanswered Question
Article date: 15/01/08 | Last edited: 24/12/08
Leonard Bernstein - A highly regarded composer of both Classical and Broadway, an accomplished pianist, a great conductor, and an eloquent musicologist. Noam Chomsky - Professor of Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard By: Leonard Bernstein
The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein’s musical creativity have been recognized and enjoyed by millions. These lectures, Mr. Bernstein’s most recent venture in musical explication, will make fascinating reading as well.
“The pages that follow were written not to be read, but listened to; and the fact that they do now exist in book form seems to me a moving testimony to the fidelity and creative involvement of numerous colleagues. It has been a long four years from the day I made my first notation in the flyleaf of Noam Chomsky’s Language and Mind to this moment of publication.”
Mr. Bernstein considers music ranging from Hindu ragas through Mozart and Ravel, to Copland, suggesting a worldwide, innate musical grammar. Folk music, pop songs, symphonies, modal, tonal, atonal, well-tempered and ill-tempered works all find a place in these discussions. Each, Mr. Bernstein suggests, has roots in a universal language central to all artistic creation. Using certain linguistic analogies, he explores the ways in which this language developed and can be understood as an aesthetic surface. Drawing on his insights as a master composer and conductor, Mr. Bernstein also explores what music means below the surface: the symbols and metaphors which exist in every musical piece, of whatever sort. And, finally, Mr. Bernstein analyzes twentieth century crises in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, finding even here a transformation of all that has gone before, as part of the poetry of expression, through its roots in the earth of human experience.
Language and Mind By: Noam Chomsky
Chomsky’s outstanding collection of essays on language and mind. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This new edition complements them with an additional chapter and a new preface, bringing Chomsky’s influential approach into the twenty-first century.
Chapters 1-6 present Chomsky’s early work on the nature and acquisition of language as a genetically endowed, biological system (Universal Grammar), through the rules and principles of which we acquire an internalized knowledge (I-language). Over the past fifty years, this framework has sparked an explosion of inquiry into a wide range of languages, and has yielded some major theoretical questions. The final chapter revisits the key issues, reviewing the ‘biolinguistic’ approach that has guided Chomsky’s work from its origins to the present day, and raising some novel and exciting challenges for the study of language and mind.
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I watched this twice to make sure I understood him correctly, nonetheless it was an interesting and thought-provoking point he makes. It would have been good to sit in that room and listen to Mr Bernstein.
Is the rest of this lecture posted somewhere? And, what are your thoughts on the metaphysical language of music? Is it true? Is this the reason why music has meaning to so many different people?