Featured Work
Songfest (1977)
Originally commissioned to be a work in celebration of the American Bicentennial Year, Songfest drawssa 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:
"Sharing, if I dare be so bold, is the whole meaning of my life…this driving need to share is somehow related to that compulsive drive to teach what I mentioned earlier. But, it is even more than that.
I freely confess, for whatever it is worth, that nothing in this life of ours exists for me at all until, or unless, I can share it with others, whether it be with one single person or five, or five million…There is no sunset, however beautiful, no joke, however funny, no poem, no voyage, no movie, no meal, even, that I can enjoy only by myself.”
-Leonard Bernstein, 1981