Exploring Leonard Bernstein's Inspired Youth in Boston
Carol J. Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music
“Bernstein and Boston” has become an energizing mantra during recent semesters at Harvard, as an ambitious collaboration gained steam between Harvard’s Office for the Arts and Department of Music. Conceived in the fall of 2004, the Bernstein project has sprouted more offshoots than any of us initially imagined. Fundamental since the start has been the involvement of students—both graduates and undergraduates—in research and performance. These Bernstein-related activities will culminate in Leonard Bernstein, Boston to Broadway, a major international festival taking place October 12-14. For the festival, students are serving as curators of an exhibit in the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library and Lamont Library, presenting research papers about intriguing themes in Bernstein’s youth, contributing to the festival program book, and performing in two different concerts.
My own path to becoming a co-creator of the festival (along with Jack Megan, Director of OFA; Thomas Lee, Program Manager of OFA’s Learning from Performers; and Juilliard’s Judith Clurman) emerged while writing Bernstein and Broadway, a book to be published by Yale University Press. Surprisingly, the literature about Bernstein’s shows— even the much-celebrated West Side Story— is slim indeed. After joining the Harvard faculty in 2003, I found myself wondering about Bernstein within the context of local history. Born in 1918, he was raised in the greater Boston area (largely in Roxbury and Newton), attended Boston Latin High School and Harvard, and took his first steps here as composer and performer. How do Bernstein’s Boston experiences illuminate his mature output?
Last spring, I joined with Watts Professor of Music Kay Kaufman Shelemay to kick-start the process of answering that question by team-teaching a seminar titled “Before West Side Story: Leonard Bernstein’s Boston,” in which students conducted research throughout the greater Boston area. Our goal was not conventional biography. Others have already done that, most notably Humphrey Burton in his Leonard Bernstein (Doubleday, 1994). Rather, we imagined a new kind of life study—one which situates an international celebrity like Bernstein amidst the interlinking ethnic, religious, educational, and musical communities that defined his youth. We led the students in fusing ethnographic and archival research, and in conducting interviews as a class. We also divided the class into research teams that explored such topics as Bernstein’s elementary school education in Roxbury; his adolescent theater productions; his formative contact with orchestras and conductors, whether Serge Koussevitzky and the BSO or Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops; his Harvard stage productions; his involvement at Brandeis University during its early years; and his family’s ties to Congregation Mishkan Tefila, the second oldest synagogue in the Boston area. We even took a bus tour to chart the geography of Bernstein’s childhood. During the course of team research, one graduate student (Ryan Bañagale) discovered an unknown arrangement by Bernstein of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, completed in 1937 when he was a counselor at a summer camp in the Berkshires (it has been edited by Bañagale and will receive its concert premiere at the festival). A freshman (Kara Furman) began the process of exploring the ongoing life of the majestic old Mishkan Tefila building in Roxbury; since the congregation moved to Chestnut Hill in the late 1950s, it has housed an African American dance company and various churches. A senior (Stephanie Samuels) and graduate student (Lily Yeh) combed through the archives of Mishkan Tefila, focusing especially on the career of Solomon Braslavsky, who was organist and choir director at the temple and who had a profound impact on the young Bernstein. The students conducted an extraordinary number of interviews, locating many of Bernstein’s surviving childhood acquaintances in an effort to preserve memories that would otherwise be lost. Shira Brettman (a junior) resourcefully browsed through www.whitepages.com to retrieve contact information for a surprising number of people involved in Bernstein’s summer theater productions in Sharon during the 1930s. All of these materials will be deposited in Harvard’s Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library.
Continue to page two: Connecting the Threads
