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:
“It’s incredible really how deep a contact you can make through music with people of all kinds of backgrounds and origins and ideologies and systems...
I humbly hope that we’ve made a contribution so that international understanding everybody always talks about...also includes exchange of feelings and there are no feelings warmer than those engendered by music.
I always think that the might of a nation may be its strong right arm but the culture of a nation, the art of a nation is its left arm which is closer to the heart and reaches more people.”
Leonard Bernstein
Speech to the National Press Club
October 13th, 1959