Maestro @3QD – The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [Rock and Roll!]

My latest article for 3 Quarks Daily is now online: Some Scattered Thoughts about Maestro, Music, and the Meaning of It All

I might have subtitled it, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which is the title of a very well-known book by Irving Goffman. As Steven Spielberg put it in an interview I quote in my article (04:16): “How do you represent yourself to yourself and to the world.”

That’s a topic that was central to a famous interview that Edward R. Murrow conducted with Bernstein and his wife. About 38 minutes into the film, Murrow asks: “Lenny, what’s the big difference in the life of Composer Bernstein and Conductor Bernstein?” Here’s Bernstein’s reply:

Well I suppose it’s a difference. It’s personality difference which occurs between any composer or any creator versus any performer. Any performer, whether it’s Toscanini or Tallulah Bankhead, or whoever it is, leads a kind of public life. An extrovert life, if you will. It’s an oversimplified word, but something like that. Whereas a creative person, uh, sits alone in this great studio that you see here and writes all by himself and communicates with the world in a very private way and lives alone in this great studio that you see here and writes all by himself and communicates with the world in a very private way and lives a rather grand inner life rather than a grand outer life. And if you carry around both personalities, I suppose that means you become a schizophrenic and that’s the end of it.

Here, as reference material, is the original interview.

The passage I quoted above starts at about 03:27. If you compare the two, you’ll see that some relatively minor changes have been made for the film.

* * * * *

My 3QD piece centered on how Bernstein presented himself as a conductor and, in particular, how he conducted himself on the podium. He had a very flamboyant style, which was widely criticized at the time.

For what it’s worth, I sensed that there was something off in the way Cooper conducted the finale to Mahler’s Second Symphony, the dramatic climax of the film, which occurred about three fifths or so through the film. I was thinking that maybe Cooper was too flamboyant, but I was wrong about that. Subsequently I listed to critiques by two young conductors no one has ever heard of (by which I mean me) who pointed out that his timing was a bit off. OK, so my intuition was correct, but my understanding of it was not.

That Cooper’s timing was off, that’s a minor issue. What’s interesting is that he spent so much time – six years of preparation – trying to get it right. That’s the remarkable thing. Who’d notice if he nailed it? Why does that matter?

That’s one thing. There’s also the historical question, which the film avoided. Why? These days flamboyant conducting is not the issue it was in Bernstein’s time. I suspect that bringing up the issue would have been a distraction.

If they’d have gone into the question, what would they have turned up? That’s a tricky question, and I suppose different people would come up with different answers. Were I to tackle the question, I’d argue that by the end of the 19th century classical music had been assigned to an abstract non-physical realm of Platonic ideals. Flamboyant physical movement shatters that illusion as it brings attention to the conductor’s body and so physicalizes the music. That, however, would require an argument, which is more than I want to present in this note.

* * * * *

Instead, I want to conclude with a very different interview. Back on July 2, 1966, Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington were interviewed for television. Here’s the interview:

Both men were well known, both were used to presenting themselves to the public and had been doing it for years. I have a post where I analyze this interview as a performance. Because that’s what it is. They’re not on stage. They’re having a casual conversation outdoors, seated at a table at what appears to be a country club of some kind. But they’re on camera talking with an interviewer and are keenly aware of the public nature of their conversation. And, as I argue in my post, the conversation takes on the character of a negotiation between Prof. Jazz and Prof. Classical on behalf of their respective musical traditions. From my post:

5:05, Ellington, “...what I’ve been trying in talking...trying to de-categorize this, it’s American music.” Note that Ellington did not particularly like the term “jazz.” He goes on, “it’s getting to the point where the modern contemporary composer and the guy who’s supposed to be a modern jazz composer, they all come out of the same conservatories.” [...] Bernstein remarks that Ellington was one of the pioneers; he replies that he didn’t come out of the conservatory [laughter]. Bernstein refers to Ellington’s “so-called symphonic jazz” & Ellington remarks that he “had a conservatory in the capital theater...sit there and listen to the symphony before the picture.”

5:53, Bernstein offers, “you wrote symphonic jazz and I wrote jazz symphonies.” They laugh, Ellington offers his hand, Bernstein accepts. As musical analysis that phrase is, if not exactly nonsense, nearly so. As a proposal in a cultural negotiation, which this is, it is very good. And the chiasmic formulation (“symphonic jazz,” “jazz symphonies”) is crucial to the proposal. By turning it into wordplay, something Ellington knew very well, that phrase makes it work as a proposal and elicits both the laughter and the handshake. The words are a proposal while the handshake is the mutual acceptance.

THAT’s the world in which Bernstein evolved his public persona. How did the parallel world of African American music affect so-called Classical music and its sense of itself in the world? The relationship between these two musical cultures was an important theme in the the cultural life of 20th century America starting in the 1920s and continuing through the 1960s and beyond. That’s the world in which Bernstein gyrated and gesticulated while conducting.