Rating: 
Summary: Transformational Grammar to Transforming Art and Insight...
Review: Leonard Bernstein's approach to explaining music, its
composition, its structure, its tonalities, its historical
context and influence is incredible in this series.
You will never think of Debussy in the same way
again after you hear Bernstein's discussion of him.
If you thought that Debussy was just some flowery
French aesthete writing gossamer chords and haunting
tonalities, then Bernstein will open your mind to
his true significance. In similar fashion, Bernstein
makes Wagner's profound genius and contribution to
the furtherance of music and its development into
later forms completely understandable.
Then Bernstein conducts the orchestra, the Boston
Symphony Orchestra in several of the pieces. His
interpretaion of the "Prelude and Liebestod" from
_Tristan und Isolde_ is incredible...perhaps the
slowest, but most intense, compelling, emotional
version I have ever heard.
If you wish to truly understand music, its
structural, tonal, chordal underpinnings and the
effects which can be produced by the artistic
genius of composition and insightful, empathetic
interpretation, this series is a required course
in artistic "grammar."
Rating:
Summary: This is awesome...
Review: This lecture series is great for all levels of music lovers, from the beginner to the expert, because of the broadness of material covered. Bernstein is captivating, the lectures are wonderful. It is a delight. You will want to have been there, that is for sure. Recommended highly.
Rating: 
Summary: In some ways brilliant, yet the sum isn't up to the parts
Review: This series of talks presented by Leonard Bernstein at Harvard in 1973 has many fascinating components, but the overall thesis seems like an argument in search of a point. Bernstein is always interesting and enthusiastic in these sorts of things, but he also tends to ramble and drag in everything but the kitchen sink in order to buttress his points. He attempts to connect his musical theory of "innateness" to the development of speech patterns--unnecessarily in my view, and the connection is never really fully explained. In the end he concludes the 20th century characteristics in art--of irony, existentialism, and self-reference--are a result of the horrors of modern times, of the Holocaust, the two world wars, and the nuclear age. It's a premise put forth in his "Age of Anxiety" Symphony and I didn't buy it then either. Never does he explain *why* one leads to the other, he just seems to assume the relationship is evident. And, I hate to appear to be upstaging Bernstein, but I think I have a simpler and easier-to-defend thesis (and it's not my original idea, either).I agree the modern artistic age is characterized by irony, references (self and other) and a revisiting of the old in new clothes. However, I don't see any link to the "horrors of the 20th century" as to why we can't directly say "I love you" when we mean "I love you." Rather, I think the reason irony and assorted deconstructionist techniques sprang up in the 20th century is because we finally had the history and the heritage for them to exist and make sense. Musical language was direct in Mozart's time, in Bach's time, in Beethoven's time, because they were inventing it. By the time we reach Mahler, it is fully developed and we find ourselves in the process of "deconstructing" it (or he did). Before that time, there wasn't the heritage and history *to* deconstruct. To make my point, jazz, despite coming of age in the ashes of World War I, didn't become ironic and deconstructionist through the first half of the 20th century, until the 1950s. Its deconstruction was borne not from any of the horrors of the Holocaust or the atom bomb, but from its own accumulation of tradition and technique. Ditto the cinema. In short, you can't deconstruct until the construction is complete. So Bernstein's argument, in my view, doesn't hold water, but is the very sort of Romantic and poetic vision that appeals to him. (On another documentary I have, he waxes poetic on the anguish and turmoil trapped in the person of Gustav Mahler while never bothing to back up his thesis with a shred of documentary evidence.) However, while I don't agree with his conclusion, the journey he takes to get there is fascinating, filled with analyses of such landmark works as Mozart's Symphony No. 40, Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Berg's Violin Concerto, and Stravinsky's Le Sacre, just to name a few. Also, his discussions of tonality, the "Circle of Fifths" and the evolution of Western harmony are fascinating. There's a certain amount of annoying preening--there are times when he's really milking his little Harvard audience for applause, and you'd think that by that point in his career he wouldn't need it--but this is easy to overlook. The video is clean and the audio is quite good for the time. Overall this is a set worth getting, despite my reservations about Bernstein's overall argument and his attempts to strengthen it by linking it to linguistics, a melding I think is artificial and unnecessary. (It reminds me of early jazz scholars trying to make their work appear more solid by forcing analogies between jazz and classical music.) I do recommend this set, but beware Lenny's excessive Romanticisms!
Rating:
Summary: A MUST-HAVE FOR STUDENTS OF MUSIC OF ALL AGES !
Review: This set has been a much-treasured discovery for me. Anybody with
an interest in music should have it for a better understanding of
musical structure.
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