Review: Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician

296 pages, Hardcover, University of California Press, $24.95

To anyone who recently suffered through a grueling set of midterms, take heart: Leonard Bernstein received a C in one of his music classes as a Harvard undergraduate, and things worked out pretty well for him. As a conductor, a composer and an educator, Bernstein had an indelible impact upon the American musical community. In 1943, he made his conducting début with the New York Philharmonic, of which he would eventually become music director. Over the next five decades, he went on to compose some of the most famous works in the American repertoire, from musical theater to symphonies to ballets. He demonstrated his commitment to teaching in a variety of forms such as the Norton Lectures at Harvard and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, joyous celebrations of musical expression that incorporated everything from Beethoven concertos to Beatles tunes.

But while Bernstein’s stunningly successful musical career makes for a rosy and inspirational story, it does not convey the whole of his life and work. Barry Seldes’ fascinating new book, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, brings to light another essential element of Bernstein’s life: his interaction with the political landscape of his era.

The twentieth century, in Bernstein’s words, was “the century of death.” It was the century of “fifty, sixty, seventy years of world holocausts, of the simultaneous advance of democracy with our increasing inability to stop making war, of the simultaneous magnification of national pieties with the intensification of our active resistance to social equality.” As these sentiments make abundantly clear, Bernstein’s music-making did not take place in an aesthetic and cultural vacuum, but rather in conjunction with a deep awareness of the tumultuous political climate in which he lived. And from the beginning of his career, Bernstein linked his political views to his musical endeavors.

In 1937, while still a college student, he showed his solidarity with the Communist composer Marc Blitzstein by staging a production of Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, a pro-union allegory about corporate greed and corruption. Even liberal Cambridge banned the production, forcing Bernstein to move it from the city to the Harvard campus at the last minute. Bernstein’s leftist sympathies soon began to extend beyond musical statements to more explicitly political activities. Seldes’ book provides numerous examples of the causes Bernstein supported during the 1940s, which ranged from the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee to the National Council on American-Soviet Friendship to Daily Worker petitions supporting Communist political candidates. His actions did not go unnoticed; the accumulation of material for Bernstein’s FBI file had begun in 1937 and would eventually comprise over eight hundred pages. By 1950, he had been blacklisted by not only by CBS, which had broadcast his early New York Philharmonic concerts, but also effectively by the Philharmonic itself. Ultimately forced to sign a non-communist affidavit, Bernstein managed to salvage his career, but only at the price of what he referred to as a “ghastly and humiliating experience.”

His musical career revitalized, Bernstein’s commitment to political activity remained strong. The next major scandal to befall him came in the form of the fundraiser he hosted for the Black Panthers in 1970. This event is infamous, but Seldes supplements it with new detail about the FBI’s response, which included sending Bernstein antagonistic, anonymous letters.

But how did Bernstein’s politics interact with his music? Seldes offers the compelling argument for repeated correlation between Bernstein’s compositional projects and the political backdrop against which they were created. His 1964 Chichester Psalms is a choral symphony of texts that deal with the themes of peace and unity, a fitting counterpart to the Left’s political optimism in the early 1960s. But by 1977, Bernstein had shifted his focus to works like Songfest. Another choral symphony, this work expresses no sense of unity and peace. It is a fragmented collection of American poems set to various styles of music, many of them dark in tone and subject matter. With works like Songfest, Seldes asserts, Bernstein “made quite clear his ambivalence about American culture and politics.” Considering the conservative resurgence taking place around him, Bernstein’s choice to compose non-patriotic, non-celebratory music seems unsurprising.

While it may be tempting to dismiss these correlations as pure coincidence, Bernstein himself acknowledged a clear relationship between his musical and political views. His 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard University theorized that tonal music was worthwhile precisely because it could express shared human emotions and morality. The musically centerless form of atonality, he thought, paralleled the morally centerless world that could permit totalitarianism and war, and was thus unacceptable. Though this point of view alienated Bernstein from most of his musical contemporaries, he remained convinced that tonality was important not just for its aesthetic value, but for its moral and social importance in uniting people through music.

Despite the strength of this conviction, though, Bernstein never really succeeded in producing a work that melded musical greatness and sociopolitical significance. Why? For Seldes, the answer again lies in politics. Bernstein’s career was framed by the culturally hostile 1950s on one side and the Reagan conservatism of the 1980s on the other. These political climates were inhospitable to the composition of a grand, eloquent musical representation of American society. For Bernstein, music and politics would have to remain forever separate.

Ironically, the only notable weakness of Seldes’ book parallels Bernstein’s: like his subject, the author has difficulty finding the perfect balance between political background and the remainder of his work. Long sections that contain no mention of Bernstein or his story can feel like U.S.-history textbook chapters. But on the whole, the book takes a fascinating journey through Bernstein’s musical and political career. Seldes’ analyses of politics and music are equally elegant, and clear enough that one does not need a musical background to appreciate the story he tells. To anyone interested in American culture or American politics, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician offers a compelling and intriguing account of an extraordinary man.

As tens of thousands of conspiracy theorists, right wing survivalists, and revanchist malcontents of all varieties streamed into Washington, DC this past September 12 to protest…well, everything, it was all too easy (and fun!) to point and laugh at the various nuts parading through the nation’s capital. There was the requisite Confederate flag, and a bizarre Photoshop of Barack Obama as Francisco Franco that is even more bizarrely labeled “MARXIST.” My personal favorite was the sign accurately noting that the Obama administration has “more czars than the USSR.”

But the highlight of the occasion was not to be found in the streets, but on Fox News, where the 9/12 Project’s founder, Glenn Beck, had prepared a ten-minute video for the occasion. It is a masterpiece of passion, schmaltzy music, and irrepressible incoherence. It begins with Beck standing on a skyscraper in Times Square, directly in front of the Empire State Building, extolling various landmarks around him (Did you know that the Statue of Liberty is in New York? True fact!), before he dives head-first into a rant about how “America” has failed to rebuild the World Trade Centers. Why? Special interests, of course. How will we rebuild them? By marching on Washington. Because that, my friends, is how buildings are made.

To most liberals, Beck is a modern day Father Coughlin, another demagogue in the Fox mold peddling dangerous half-truths and lies for mass consumption. I do not disagree, and indeed think the work of groups like Think Progress and Media Matters is invaluable in attempting to marginalize him as a serious political force. But acknowledging that he is a dangerous force should not prevent us from recognizing the almost wholly unintentional brilliance of his program, his persona, his “projects,” and indeed his entire existence as a media force.

His show presents itself as comic brilliance. Beck once stood in front of the blackboard in his show’s set, writing down the names of various enemies—Obama, the Left, Internationalists, Graft, ACORN-style organizations, Revolutionaries, and Hidden Agendas—and posited that if we added one letter to this acronym (OLIGARH), we would see the true enemy facing America. That one letter? Y, of course. What, did you think Beck was talking about something other than the OLIGARHY?

Not all of the show’s “jokes” are so broad and farcical. Indeed, a careful viewer can appreciate Beck’s more subtle laugh lines. Shortly after railing against the dread OLIGARHY, Beck looked into the camera and forcefully promised his viewers, “I will tell you exactly the place to go, the way you can save your republic.” Then, as stock cable news transition music started to play, he switched into a hilariously cliché announcer voice and chirped, “That’s tomorrow! Don’t miss it!”

But beyond its irresistible humor, Beck’s show is densely peppered with literary, or at least middlebrow cinematic, allusion. Take the aforementioned blackboard, onto which he scrawls the names of the enemies who have failed him in ever-more-vaguely explained ways. As Beck himself has said, his frantic drawing of connections resembles the scenes of Russell Crowe clipping news articles in A Beautiful Mind. As Rick Perlstein noted after this admission of Beck’s, these were the scenes meant to establish that Crowe’s character, John Nash, was a paranoid schizophrenic.

Indeed, if Beck was focused on avoiding comparisons to mentally ill people, surely he never would have told a New York Times reporter that he views himself as a modern day Howard Beale. Beale is the main character of the 1970s news thriller Network, a suicidal news anchor who undergoes a complete mental breakdown and emerges as a demagogue ranting about the evils of the Arabs and corporations and bellowing slogans like, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In fact, there is something refreshing about the self-awareness shown by Beck’s self-comparison to Beale, who throughout his career in Network is repeatedly manipulated by cynical TV executives desperate for ratings and willing to put a clearly deranged man on the air for the sake of viewership. Beck knows he’s being used, and he simply does not care.

No discussion of Beck would be complete without commenting on his brilliant evisceration of the rhetorical gymnastics employed by racists to disguise their bigotry. Beck, being a racist, knows intimately the subtlety needed to express one’s prejudices in polite company. For instance, when appearing on Fox & Friends in July he started off with a bang, accusing President Obama of a “deep-seated hatred of white people and the white culture.” When pressed on this by one of his hosts, he immediately backtracked, clarifying, “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people,” before reestablishing his bigot bona fides by saying, “This guy is, I believe, a racist.” Beck does a brilliant job of exposing an all too familiar dance between social necessity and primal prejudice.

It can be somewhat frightening to remember to remember that Beck does not view his show as a farce or self-satire but rather as a serious news show. That said, a focus on his aesthetic qualities seems justified. Until Glenn Beck does become a marginalized force in broadcast media, it seems a waste to pass up on the opportunity to gaze into the frenzied psyche of right-wing America.

So let us appropriate its entertainment value, disregarding the intent and appreciating it for the brilliant self-satire it is. Almost limitless amusement will come of it.

BOSTON – Since President Barack Obama took the oath of office in January and lifted restrictions on stem-cell research, the nation’s laboratories have been moving forward apace with their micropipette-ready projects. According to a scientist who has spoken on conditions of anonymity, the first batch of Scalopus anthropomorphus, a mole-human chimera formed by exposure of human stem-cells to the epigenetic conditions of a mole embryo, have already reached maturity.

The animals are reportedly two feet tall, obese, and short-sighted. Their abilities to tunnel and carry small semi-automatic weapons make them ideal for battling internal threats. This reporter could not find any conformation for the pervasive rumor that the first generation of mole people has struck an alliance with the giant albino sewer alligators.

Although the government has not yet officially confirmed the existence of the mole people, debate has begun among scholars of constitutional law about the legality of a specialized internal militia of humanoids. Comparisons have been drawn to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret international military hit-squad.

Some responses from influential figures have been positive. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has suggested that the mole people could be put to use tracking UFOs. However, the tone of the news media has been much harsher. Fox News reporters have repeatedly claimed that the mole people answer only to Bill Ayers’ orders and will be used to enforce the new tax code.

Political analysts have been hard-pressed trying to guess where the mole people fit into President Obama’s agenda. The most prominent explanation has been offered by Jerome Corsi (Unfit for Command, The Obama Nation) who in an op-ed column of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offered a close-reading of a “prophetic passage” in The Audacity of Hope.

The modern woman is powerful, well-dressed and cares for her children. According to advertisers, she also loves yogurt, cleaning her house and will buy anything that promises pseudo-sexual satisfaction.

Sarah Haskins thinks that these stereotypes are ludicrous and she’s ready to prove it. On “Target Women,” a segment on Current TV’s Infomania, Haskins mocks television commercials visibly aimed at women. The products—from yogurt, “the official food of women,” to “scientifically proven” skin cleaners—are diverse, but the message is always the same: buy this product and you will be the perfect woman.

Haskins began her comedic career as a member of Immediate Gratification Players at Harvard. After she graduated in 2001 with a degree in History and Literature, Haskins moved to Chicago. She now resides in Los Angeles, where she both writes and hosts for Current TV.

And for the record: Sarah Haskins does not like yogurt. Her favorite dairy product is cheese.

Perspective Magazine: How did you get the idea for “Target Women”?
Sarah Haskins: We wanted to expand at Current TV. We used to only have pods (short pieces) and we decided we wanted to do something longer. I was already writing for Infomania, but I was interested in doing something on camera.

I was watching TV and I saw all those ridiculous yogurt ads. I thought, “Those are dumb!” “Target Women” was built around that.

P: How do you decide if an advertisement targets women?

H: We talk about some advertisements which target women and men — like Eharmony. But most of time it’s pretty apparent that the main target is women. This week’s “Target Women” focuses on Barbie. Next week, I’m talking about those horrifying Frito Lay commercials. [We just decide from] watching the ads. Who’s in them? Are they women? Who buys or is expected to buy the product? It’s not a science—it’s more like a hunch. And if the ad is on during Oprah, it probably targets women.

P: Why do women make good targets?

H: From an advertiser’s standpoint, women are seen as in charge of certain spheres of life and product purchase. There are some spheres which are uniquely female, like the house and the kids. Women are seen as controlling a domestic budget and buy for that aspect of their lives. You can see the breakdown in car commercials. If they want women to buy the car, the commercial highlights safety, how well the brakes work and the kids in the backseat. If they want guys, it’s like, “Look at this car in the mountains!”

P: A lot of your work centers around the idea of the perfect woman—it seems that when advertisements target women, they are playing on certain ideals.

H: I think that what we are dealing with now is an idea of the perfect woman which has expanded. The perfect woman today is almost perfect at everything. She’s a mother, she’s physically beautiful, she’s perfect in the working world and at home. There’s a sense of all-encompassing perfection. And that means that there are so many ways you can improve yourself. When the perfect woman is around, no one’s feelings get hurt. She serves the workplace and her family. Do you know about the cult of the womanhood in American history? At the turn of century, there was a sense popularized in society and in women’s magazines that it was the woman’s job to be in charge of domestic sphere. Now, roles have changed, but we see the same attachment with the idea of a woman being in charge of her home. The woman’s role on the home front, as nurturer, is one she plays in the workplace as well. Also, the perfect woman always wears high heels.

P: That sounds like a lot to live up to.
H: Well, advertisements are by nature aspirational. Yeah, combined, the message is pretty demanding…but the advertising is also really bland.

P: Why do you find them so bland?
H: Everyone in those advertisements is always so sweet. The perfect woman is also always in a good mood. Except when there’s a mess. But then she has the perfect product and mess is gone.

P: I have also noticed that a lot of the advertisements that target women, such as advertisements about food and cleaning products, seem to focus on sex.
H: Yeah—it’s all about sex. I may be reading into it, though. It’s something I should discuss with my therapist.

P: Well, if we assume that neither of us is reading into it, why do you think advertisers would focus so much on sex?
H: Okay. Well, the sex is definitely there. But it is disguised sex. Disguised pleasure. Chocolate is easy—there’s the old saying that chocolate is better than sex. But with other products, the sex is more disguised. I think it’s partly a joke to think that the satisfaction from cleaning can is as exciting as actual physical and emotional intimacy.

P: Do you think that this focus on sex suggests that women are missing something? Is the idea of the perfect woman incompatible with being sexual?
H: I think the focus on sex also undercuts the idea. I mean sex—it’s what you are missing out on if you are everyone’s maid all day long.

P: Okay, the requisite Harvard alum question—did you ever pee on the John Harvard statue?
H: No. But I peed in a lot of places around Harvard.

By Daniel Villafana

Letter from the Editor

Dear Readers,

The Harvard Viral Review was founded to aid students in their procrastination. Statistics I have just made up show that 40% of all-nighters are a direct result of viral streaming. We have all put off an assignment because YouTube is only a click away. If precious time is to be inevitably wasted, it is our goal at HVR to help you do it in a productive way.

Viral streaming has also become a popular way of socializing. HRV takes a public stand against Final Clubs. We feel it is possible to decrease Final Club popularity by referring students to quality online entertainment. Every time a group of students stay home on a Saturday night and gather around a computer screen, it warms our hearts and motivates us to continue to write these otherwise useless reviews.

Love,

Daniel

P.S. Last November in search of Two Girls One Cup I came across Two Girls One Ballot. That viral inspired me to go out and vote for our new president.   Internet videos are a powerful thing.

John McCain and His Vegetable Friends

Obama’s good looks are really first class; he defeated a superhero in a race to the country’s presidency. John McCain a superhero? Yes. Much in the same way that Aquaman can speak to marine animals, John McCain can speak with vegetables. Agriman! This animated viral is the quickest and perhaps cheapest way to experience a bad trip, if for some reason you would ever want to. The replay value is –(High), that is to say you will replay it several times but not for your enjoyment. You will also find that this video is very useful in getting people to leave your room.

The Front Fell Off

This debate between John Clarke and Bryan Dawe will make you break a cold sweat after two minutes of rib-clutching laughter. No worries, though; it is a satire. The skit is a parody of an interview about an oil tanker accident in which the “front fell off.”  Quick summary: 20,000 tons of crude oil spilled into the ocean, but no harm was done because the wreck was quickly towed outside of the environment. Now that green is the new crimson, comedy like this is becoming increasingly popular.  This viral is a friendly reminder that people who do not believe in global warming and can tell you with a straight face are CRAZY. The replay value is mild, like a dab of Tabasco deluded with lemon.

The Sheppard Tone

This viral is sound only. What seems to be a tone continually getting lower is in fact a repetition of the same series of pitches. If this technical mumbo-jumbo does not make any sense, here it is in layman’s terms:  OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Final word, this video is trippin’ balls.

Kittens, Inspired by Kittens

If you need to judge a person’s character, sit them down in front of this viral. If you do not hear an “AAWWWW” out of that person’s mouth within ten seconds after pressing play, you know that you are in the presence of evil. Seriously, if there is a heaven, it consists of an infinite playback of Kittens, Inspired by Kittens. Every time I watch this video I forget that Sinclair’s The Jungle was ever written. Replay value: download it as a .wmv and make it your desktop background.

A Bit of Fry and Laurie – “Mystery Song”

Doesn’t watching a Steven Fry and Hugh Laurie skit make you feel so sophisticated? Laugh with your legs crossed, try it and see, it’s so cool, quite a mystery. Take your laptop, sit under a tree, press play and listen: instant ecstasy.

Hugh Laurie has written a beautiful love song. The piano plays a soothing melody while Laurie’s voice hits notes that many thought were unique to the range of Kermit the Frog. The song unfolds the mystery of Laurie’s love. It starts off very innocently; Laurie is concerned that his lover may live in a different country. Listeners cannot help but cheer him on as he examines his heart under a magnifying glass. In the latter half of the song, however, we discover that in fact his love has died…fifteen years ago, this coming January. Then the tears come, they did for me. If you are not familiar with Fry and Laurie, consider this your gateway drug. Once you watch it and fall in love, watch their Hey Jude and Tricky Linguistics.

GI Joe PSA Ice

Watch this viral. DON’T WATCH THIS VIRAL. This is a parody of the GI Joe cartoon series. Clips are cut from episodes and then dubbed over. I am often told that this is a video only teenage boys will enjoy, and although I am against gender profiling, this is one case where it is true. It is difficult to pinpoint what exactly is funny, but rest assured that it is. If GI Joe tickles your pickle, watch a few of the other clips. If you fail to see the humor then you are a penis pump, pshh. Replay value = 1/0

Until everything fell apart, my heart lay with John Edwards

The soft hair, the soothing accent, the proletarian pandering…all too perfect! But Edwards soon abandoned me.  I fell sobbing into the warm embrace of the junior senator from Illinois, whose soar-ing rhetoric felt like a coded message to a solidly leftist base.

Such honey-sweet words! “We need fundamental change!” “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Anyways, millions of college students couldn’t be wrong.  We weren’t wrong in the 60’s!

And by the election, I had invested my hopes in the romanticized Fox News version of our man.

“I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” Obama would finally address the large-scale socio-economic root causes of racial disparity…right?

“Make them go to bed at a reasonable time, keep them off the streets, give them some breakfast, come on!”
Obama’s victory, of course, felt like a deeply moving personal victory for all of us 

But in the months that followed, the magic wore off and I noticed that the president-elect possessed one trait that I hadn’t noticed before… centrism. Obama’s appointments were dis-appointments: Tom Vilsack…Hillary Clinton…fine.  But Rick Warren?!

But by now it was too late.  My feelings for Barack Obama ran deep…deeper than could be rationalized.

I wish I knew how to quit you.