The Unanswered Question 1973 3 Musical Semantics Bernstein Norton. Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature. Leonard Bernstein’s Masterful Lectures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Recorded in 1973) In 1972, the composer Leonard Bernstein returned to Harvard, his alma mater, to serve as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, with “Poetry” being defined in the broadest sense. The position, first created in 1925, asks faculty members to live on campus, advise students, and most importantly, deliver a series of six public lectures. T.S. Eliot, Aaron Copland, W.H. Auden, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Jorge Luis Borges — they all previously took part in this tradition. And Bernstein did too. Delivered in the fall of 1973 and collectively titled “The Unanswered Question,” Bernstein’s lectures covered a lot of terrain, touching on poetry, linguistics, philosophy and physics.
But the focus inevitably comes back to music — to how music works, or to the underlying grammar of music. Lecture 2: Musical Syntax Lecture 3: Musical Semantics Lecture 4: The Delights & Dangers of Ambiguity Lecture 5: The 20th Century Crisis Lecture 6: The Poetry of Earth. David Byrne Gives Us the Lowdown on How Music Works (with Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin) “I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation,” writes eclectically minded musician David Byrne in the opening chapter of his new book How Music Works. “That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.” This comes as only the first in a series of illuminating ideas Byrne lays out in the text, a far-reaching meditation on artistic creation through the field that happens to be his specialty.
Approaching music — you know, the stuff he made at the front of the Talking Heads and continues to make in solo albums and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno and St. Vincent — from as many angles as he can, he writes about its technology, the business of it, its social elements, its role in his life, and what science and nature have to teach us about its mechanics. Watching this back-and-forth, I could swear to seeing some of the concepts developed in How Music Works taking early shape in Byrne’s head. Related content: Oliver Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stewart. In Comedy | June 30th, 2009 Leave a Comment This conversation, both funny and a little informative, is worth your time. This will hopefully whet your appetite, and give you good reason to watch Oliver Sack’s new program on NOVA. It’s called Musical Minds and you can watch it here starting on July 1. Related Content: Central Intelligence: From Ants to the Web If you have problems watching the clip above, you can find a link to the video here.
Oliver Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stewart. CSCA Lecture: Language and cognition - Two distinct skills?