Leonard Bernstein on the three greatest songs of the 20th century
Leonard Bernstein was of the considered opinion that all great musical works centred along a single selected tempo. This can shift or sway, but there is a spine tempo that holds a masterpiece together, the through-line in a story well told. At the height of the counterculture, that backbeat seemed to transcend songs themselves and caught on as an energy of exploration that invigorated the zeitgeist.
Bernstein may well have been a classical composer, but he knew all too well that the times had changed and pop music was taking the mantle. “For a long time now I’ve been fascinated by this strange and compelling scene called pop music,” Bernstein told CBS’ Inside Pop. “I say strange because it is unlike any scene I can think of in the history of all music.”
He continued: “It is completely of, by, and for the kids. And by kids, I mean anyone from eight years old to 25. They write the songs, they sing them, own them, record them. They also buy the records, create the market. They set the fashions in the music, in dress, in dance, in hairstyle, lingo, social attitudes. And I say compelling because it shows no sign of abatement. The fads change, the groups change, but the songs keep coming increasingly odd, defiant and free.”
Although things may have grown strange, there was one constant good that never tarried but did not change: The Beatles. As the producer Charlie Greene remarked: “No matter how hard anybody tries, no matter how good they are, almost everything they do is a cop on the Beatles”. Bernstein didn’t think that exactly, but he did hold them out in front with the Beach Boys as luminaries driving pop music forward.
As Bernstein declared at the time: “There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around. It could come only out of the ferment that characterizes today’s pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today’s most important musicians, sings his own ‘Surf’s Up’. Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, ‘Surf’s Up’ is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.”
The Beach Boys were part of the “5%” of pop music that Bernstein said he not only enjoyed but saw as revolutionary in the world of music, and art at large for that matter. This new strand typified the times. When listing the masterpieces of the era, he declared: “All the truly great works of our century have been borne of despair, or of protest, or of a refuge from both, but anguish informs them all.”
Then, as part of his The Twentieth Century Crisis talk at Harvard, he rattled off the masterpieces that have abided by this, The Sun Also Rises, W. H. Auden’s ‘For the Time Being’, La Dolce Vita, and many more—but he only did name three pop songs, all of which were by The Beatles: ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘A Day in the Life’, and ‘She’s Leaving Home’. He decreed: “These too are great works, borne of despair, touched with death.”
Speaking about The Beatles, the revered composer said that they were akin to Robert Schumann when it comes to ‘She’s Leaving Home’. “This new music is much more primitive in its harmonic language,” Bernstein adds, “It relies more on the simple triad, the basic harmony of folk music. Never forget that this music employs a highly limited musical vocabulary; limited harmonically, rhythmically, and melodically. But within that restricted language, all these new adventures are simply extraordinary. Only think of the shear originality of a Beatles tune.”
As such, even the great Bernstein was affected by the anthems of the day; it brought inventiveness and curiosity to his cannon, grounded forever, not just in the backbone of tempo, but how the simple waltz it led a generation through related to the substance our lives at large. As he concluded his The Twentieth Century Crisis speech, the great works of art by The Beatles hit upon the ambiguity of the human spirit. “This is the most fascinating ambiguity of all: that is, each of us grows up, the mark of our maturity is that we learn to accept our mortality, and yet we persist in our search for immortality,” he says.
“We may believe it’s all transient, even that it’s all over,” he continues, “Yet we believe a future. We believe. We emerge from a cinema after three hours of the most abject degeneracy in a film such as La Dolce Vita, and we emerge on wings from the sheer creativity of it. We can fly on to a future. And the same is true after witnessing the hopelessness of Gadot in the theatre. Or after the aggressive violence of The Right of Spring in the concert hall. Or even after listening to the bittersweet young cynicism of an album called Revolver—we have wings to fly on. We have to believe in that kind of creativity, I know I do.”
Leonard Bernstein’s greatest songs choices:
- ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – The Beatles
- ‘A Day in the Life’ – The Beatles
- ‘She’s Leaving Home’ – The Beatles
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