Featured Work
Songfest (1977)
Originally commissioned to be a work in celebration of the American Bicentennial Year, Songfest draws a comprehensive picture of America's artistic past, as seen in 1976 through the eyes of a contemporary artist. The composer has envisioned this picture through the words of 13 poets embracing 300 years of the country's history. The subject matter of their poetry is the American artist's experience as it relates to his or her creativity, loves, marriages, or minority problems (blacks, women, homosexuals, expatriates) within a fundamentally Puritan society.
The Leonard Bernstein Office Mission
The Leonard Bernstein Office (LBO) sustains and strengthens Leonard Bernstein’s legacy by inspiring global engagement with his work as a composer, conductor, educator, and humanitarian. Through licensing, promotion, music editing, and publishing, the LBO strives to communicate his lifelong devotion to the transformative power and joy of music.
Submit your memories to the Leonard Bernstein Memory Project and help us keep his legacy alive.
Thus Spake Leonard Bernstein:
"(Being a good conductor is) a combination of study and experience, but there’s another element which is the conductor’s ability to hear the score he’s reading and to be able to imagine the composer’s intention, that’s the main thing. And I think that is the main ingredient in a successful conductor, in a good conductor, a conductor who can put himself in the place of this composer writing that piece and re-transfer it...that’s the ultimate goal, is to in study to get the sound of that composer into my heart in marking the score, transferring the sound in my head to these 80 or 100 instruments on stage, and have them give it back to the listener. Then that is a complete operation, and only then is that a successful operation, it’s a three stage one as you can see."
- Leonard Bernstein
"The Love of Three Orchestras" interview with Humphrey Burton