Notes for: August 7, 2018
Even as an undergraduate at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein had strong ideas about what American music should sound like. In his senior thesis, entitled “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music,” he envisioned an amalgam of musical traditions. His vision was that popular music, jazz, and the music of black America and Latin America would combine with European classical traditions to form a distinctively American musical sound. Years later, in one of his Young People’s Concerts, he said: “So, it’s like the English language spoken with an American accent. It’s the accent that makes it almost like a whole other language. The accent, the rhythm of speaking, the speed that comes out of the way we live, the way we move in America…. the words look the same on paper; but, boy, do they sound different!”
Soon after he arrived in New York in 1942, Bernstein turned to the theater to put his ideas to work. With Jerome Robbins he wrote the ballet Fancy Free. With Betty Comden and Adolph Green he wrote the musical On the Town, in which he drew on his classical training to tell a popular tale of three sailors on leave in the city. Most stunning of all was West Side Story, with its Latin rhythms, Tin Pan Alley lyrics, and sophisticated 20th-century style. Musical theater wasn’t Bernstein’s only focus, though. Throughout these years he also was composing much-admired symphonies, beginning with his First Symphony, “Jeremiah,” in 1943. That same year, he conducted the New York Philharmonic in a concert that brought him instant international celebrity.
In the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, Bernstein’s first published work, he shows how adept he already was at straddling the two worlds of popular culture and high art. Bernstein had studied with Paul Hindemith, whom he once described as “a true master in the great German tradition.” The sonata-form first movement shows the influence of Hindemith’s concise, Neo-Classical, contrapuntal style. The opening Grazioso begins with the clarinet meandering slowly and seductively over the piano’s steady, rhythmic, sometimes agitated counterpoint. There is some loosening up in the lively development, and by the end of the movement other strands have started to creep in – a hint of blues here, a touch of syncopation there. Everything changes in the second movement, which opens moodily and dissonantly but soon bursts out in the cheerful rhythms of jazz, with lots of syncopation and playful clarinet riffs. The soulful mood returns but again gives way to shifting, jazzy rhythms. The piano and the clarinet engage in an increasingly exuberant conversation before the clarinet brings the sonata to a close with an exultant soar to the top of its range.