I was always fascinated with Leonard Bernstein’s interdisciplinary spirit. He himself claimed that “the best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline.”

In 1973, he gave a series of 6 lectures at his alma mater – Harvard University – entitled “The Unanswered Question”. The purpose of those lectures was not so much to answer all the questions we might have, but to understand them, to redefine them, to be in a better position to make some educated guesses.

There are plenty of engaging ideas in his discussions. Here is one of them: Bernstein’s attempt to explain the language of music through the spectrum of the metaphor:

“In any sense in which music can be considered a language, and there are some senses in which it cannot be considered the language, but in the sense in which it can be, it is a totally metaphoric language. Consider the etymology of the word metaphor: meta “beyond” and pherein “to carry”. Carrying meaning beyond the literal, the tangible (…) Meatophor is a generator, the power plant of music, just as it is in poetry. Aristotle puts the metaphor midway between the unintelligible and the common place (…) it is the metaphor, he says, which most produces knowledge. And Quintilian says it even more strikingly. He says that metaphor accomplishes the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything and by everything he obviously meant our interior lives, things that can’t be named otherwise, our psychic landscapes and actions. And it is thus the poetry and music, but especially music, through its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers can and does name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.”

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• classical music
• conductor
• Harvard lecture
• language of music
• Leonard Bernstein