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Leonard Bernstein was a charismatic and versatile musician-a brilliant conductor who attained international super-star status, and a gifted composer of Broadway musicals (West Side Story), symphonies (Age of Anxiety), choral works (Chichester Psalms), film scores (On the Waterfront), and much more. Bernstein was also an enthusiastic letter writer, and this book is the first to present a wide-ranging selection of his correspondence. The letters have been selected for the insights they offer into the passions of his life-musical and personal-and the extravagant scope of his musical and extra-musical activities. Bernstein's letters tell much about this complex man, his collaborators, his mentors, and others close to him. His galaxy of correspondents encompassed, among others, Aaron Copland,Stephen Sondheim, Jerome Robbins, Thornton Wilder, Boris Pasternak, Bette Davis, Adolph Green, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and family members including his wife Felicia and his sister Shirley. The majority of these letters have never been published before. They have been carefully chosen to demonstrate the breadth of Bernstein's musical interests, his constant struggle to find the time to compose, his turbulent and complex sexuality, his political activities, and his endless capacity for hard work. Beyond all this, these writings provide a glimpse of the man behind the legends: his humanity, warmth, volatility, intellectual brilliance, wonderful eye for descriptive detail, and humor.

From his dazzling conducting debut in 1943 until his death in 1990, Leonard Bernstein's star blazed brilliantly. In this fresh and revealing biography of Bernstein's political life, Barry Seldes examines Bernstein's career against the backdrop of cold war America—blacklisting by the State Department in 1950, voluntary exile from the New York Philharmonic in 1951 for fear that he might be blacklisted, signing a humiliating affidavit to regain his passport—and the factors that by the mid-1950s allowed his triumphant return to the New York Philharmonic. Seldes for the first time links Bernstein's great concert-hall and musical-theatrical achievements and his real and perceived artistic setbacks to his involvement with progressive political causes. Making extensive use of previously untapped FBI files as well as overlooked materials in the Library of Congress's Bernstein archive, Seldes illuminates the ways in which Bernstein's career intersected with the twentieth century's most momentous events. This broadly accessible and impressively documented account of the celebrity-maestro's life deepens our understanding of an entire era as it reveals important and often ignored intersections of American culture and political power.

Leonard Bernstein is a household name. Most know him for his classic musical reworking of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as Broadway's West Side Story. But Bernstein accomplished so much more as a composer, and his body of work is both broad and varied. He composed ballets (Fancy Free, Facsimile, Dybbuk), operas (Trouble in Tahiti, Candide, A Quiet Place), musicals (On the Town, Wonderful Town), film scores (On the Waterfront), symphonies, choral works, chamber music pieces, art songs, and piano works. In Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener's Companion, Kenneth LaFave guides readers past Bernstein's famously tortured personal problems and into the clarity and balance of his Serenade after Plato's Symposium for Violin and Orchestra, the intense drama of his music for On the Waterfront, the existential cosmography of his three symphonies, and his vibrant works for the musical stage. Perhaps the most famous American classical musician born in the twentieth century, Bernstein divided his time between composing, conducting, writing, and teaching, a busy schedule—especially his conducting of major orchestras—that set his work as composer at a disadvantage. Often generated in short spurts, his work carries an urgency—and even an element of improvisational genius—that he flavored with his eclectic embrace of jazz, folk song, Jewish cantorial music, and innovations in contemporary classical theory. The result is a body of work that is beguilingly melodic, incomparably rhythmic, and irrepressibly individual. Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener's Companion is the ideal work for any reader seeking to learn how to listen across the spectrum of Bernstein's musical output.

In West Side Story: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical, Wells presents a major scholarly study of the famous American musical West Side Story, viewing the work from cultural, historical, and musical perspectives. From the \"mambo craze\" of the 1950s to the work's ongoing permeation of popular culture, Wells looks at the myriad ways in which this canonic musical reflects and refracts American culture. Drawing on primary documentary sources, oral history—including interviews with members of the original creative team such as Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents—and early sketch material, Wells explores the creation and dissemination of West Side Story to diverse audiences. After a short history of West Side Story's creation, each chapter investigates the musical from a different cultural perspective, examining its relationship to the classical canon and Leonard Bernstein's investment in that tradition, juvenile delinquency in the 1950s, feminism and the women of West Side Story, Latin-American and Hispanic influences, and its international reception and distribution. Richly illustrated with images and musical examples and complete with factual appendixes like a chronological timeline, discography, and cast and crew list, this fascinating account is exciting for specialists and non-specialists alike.

According to one of his accompanists, he performed a version of Schubert's Auf dem Strom in which he performed both the voice and horn parts. After army service (during which he played horn in the army band) he joined the Denver Symphony as fourth horn, also serving as assistant conductor. An index to the Leonard Bernstein collection at the Library of Congress contains an entry, \"Box-Folder 56/45, Vogelgesang, Frederick, 1986 (1 item),\" which might shed more light on Vogelgesang's dealings with Bernstein.

This telling book reveals the critical role played by a little-known group called the “Ducks,” a tight-knit band of six alumni determined to see a deaf president at Gallaudet. Deaf President Now! details how they urged the student leaders to ultimate success, including an analysis of the reasons for their achievement in light of the failure of many other student movements. This fascinating study also scrutinizes the lasting effects of this remarkable episode in “the civil rights movement of the deaf.” Deaf President Now! tells the full story of the insurrection at Gallaudet University, an exciting study of how deaf people won social change for themselves and all disabled people everywhere through a peaceful revolution.

Leonard Bernstein touched millions of lives as composer, conductor, teacher, and activist. He frequently visited homes around the world through the medium of television, particularly through his fifty-three award-winning Young People’s Concerts (1958-1972), which at their height were seen by nearly ten million in over forty countries. Originally designed for young viewers but equally attractive to eager adults, Bernstein’s brilliance as a teacher shined brightly in his televised presentations. And yet, despite the light touch of the “maestro,” the innocence of his audience, and the joyousness of each show’s topic, the turbulence of the times would peek through. In this first in-depth look at the series, Alicia Kopfstein-Penk’s Leonard Bernstein and His Young People’s Concerts illustrates how the cultural, social, political, and musical upheavals of the long sixties impacted Bernstein’s life and his Young People’s Concerts. Responding to trends in corporate sponsorship, censorship, and arts programming from the Golden Age of Television into the 1970s, the Young People’s Concerts would show the impact of and reflect the social and cultural politics of the Cold War, Vietnam, the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements, and the Counterculture. Bernstein cheerfully bridged classical and popular tastes, juxtaposing the Beatles with Mozart even as he offered personal, televised pleas for peace and unity. At the same time, the concerts reflect Bernstein’s troubled relationship as a professional musician with the dominance of atonality and his quest to nurture American music. Anyone who enjoys the oeuvre of Leonard Bernstein, has watched his Young People’s Concerts, or is passionate about the history of the long sixties will find in Leonard Bernstein and His Young People’s Concerts a story of all three captured in this monumental study.

Robinson talks about the TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition. The success of the annual event is a year-in-year-out expectation by volunteers, registrants, host facilities, and staff. The TMS2020 was held in San Diego just days before COVID-19 fully manifested its deplorable self and with many attendees from Asia being unable to attend. TMS2020 was nonetheless the best-attended meeting to date, and the reviews were quite good. Then, the world turned upside down. The pandemic pushed us into the unknown territory of virtual event management in the form of TMS2021 Virtual. The pandemic continued to impact TMS2022, and we held a blended event: in person in Anaheim but with some virtual elements. Attendees were delighted with the in-person experience although the virtual elements didn't click with anywhere near the same levels of enthusiasm. For TMS2023, three years after having the last \"normal\" meeting in San Diego, we are heading back to that southern California city that has so-often welcomed TMS and enchanted event participants. As with TMS2020, TMS2023 is focused on the in-person experience.

Popular culture, after all, has spent the last decade staging airless, mirthless auto-da-fés as its finest practitioners declare publicly (often with arms painfully twisted behind their backs) that art is merely the handmaiden of ideology and that no creative effort is worthy of praise unless it echoes the right dogmatic convictions. [...]we miss the power of faith. Isherwood, a conscientious objector who believed war was immoral even if waged against the Nazis, spent the last four decades of his life splitting hairs, telling the federal agents presiding over his naturalization ceremony, for example, that he would defend America only if called to serve in some pleasant and nonviolent capacity like loading ships with supplies meant for refugees.