This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely,

more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

I do see race. At times, it’s not possible to do otherwise.

Out there in cyberspace, a Twitter feed reads: “No better summation of being black in America. At the highest level having to be gracious to white people who do nothing but disrespect you.” There’s a photo of President Obama, doing his best to smile, shaking hands with the newly-elected Trump, sitting across from him. The person who sent out this tweet saw it. Others did too. You don’t have to be a supporter of the former Black president of the US to see it.

It’s there - a clinging antagonist.

Leonard Bernstein saw it! I’m convinced that’s why—underneath it all—the critics resented him. He saw and understood—too much!

Bernstein’s debut with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra began in 1969 after he left his post as music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. At that time, the then director and principle trumpet player of the VPO was not only a Nazi member but also an ex-SS member. When the Nazis entered Vienna in March 1938, they encountered little resistance. Think of those images of Viennese citizens surrounding fellow citizens who happen to be Jewish as these designated citizens are forced to clean the sidewalks—on their hands and knees. See the others, surrounded, too, and facing store front windows, pushed and hit as they are made to write antisemitic slogans. Jews were purged from public and private institutions and Jewish property confiscated. We know the rest of this story.

Bernstein, a guest conductor, called the director and trumpeter, “my little Nazi.” Is this Bernstein acknowledging the powerlessness of this individual lacking the support of the ideology adopted by a society fascinated with violence and death?

Bernstein attempts to decontaminate the insidious site of its unnatural, artificial arrangement: he re-introduces the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to the great composer Gustav Mahler who became the orchestra’s first conductor before he, yes, a Jew, was forced to leave Vienna in 1907 because of its antisemitic atmosphere. Racism doesn’t spring up all of a sudden!

It’s Bernstein the perpetual teacher, again. (Mahler will arrive in New York to become the conductor of the New York Philharmonic).

When I was a child, I had an image of Bernstein in motion, waving his baton, jumping about the podium. In the late fifties and early sixties, when the Young People’s Concerts aired on television, Bernstein’s salt and pepper hair made him appear an old man to me then. I stopped in front of my grandparent’s television just long enough to see the conductor’s hands, slowly flow to his sides, and then the camera pans behind him to the audience. And I think, well, I can’t. And I don’t take a seat on my grandfather’s armchair to watch mostly white children as they listen and learn what it means to be human.

Those children were there, and I was elsewhere.

During those years, my little collection of albums included, Odetta at Carnegie Hall, with the soulful Odetta singing, among other ballads and blues tunes, “All the Pretty Little House” and “If I Had A Ribbon Bow,” and Meet the Beatles, and I don’t recall the label but on one side of the album was “Bolero.” And the conductor: Leonard Bernstein!

In Chicago, I grew up listening to Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Harry Belafonte, Aretha Franklin, Catholic hymns, gospel, and blues. Louis and Train. I begin hearing the music of Motown in grammar school. Led Zeppelin in college. My Korean war-beatnik-poet-uncle introduces me to Ravel and Debussy when I’m a teenager. In a classroom during college, there’s a professor’s analyses of Mozart’s Symphony #40 and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony. By In 2000, listening to the whole of Miles’ Kind of Blue in the morning while I readied myself for another day teaching at a predominantly white, conservative college in Wisconsin, was like being fitted with armor that I should have know I would need…

I rediscovered Leonard Bernstein. Again.

He would be 100 years old this year, 2018. If only we had a nation of Leonard Bernsteins!

II

How to respond to violence?

You need to see the violence to eradicate it. You start where you are. Start with yourself. And you roll.

***

The New Yorker critic, Alex Ross, grew up admiring Leonard Bernstein. He returns to the year 1984. Ross, 15 years old, living in Washington DC, finds himself gravitating toward the rehearsal of Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, “The Resurrection,” conducted by none other than, Leonard Bernstein, for an event sponsored by the organization, Musicians Against Nuclear Arms. Ross listens; he watches. He’s mesmerized: “I was a small object swayed toward a life in music by the gravitational pull of the meandering planet Bernstein.”

In his 2008 article, “The Legend of Leonard Bernstein,” Ross recalls the 1970 fundraiser, hosted by Felicia Bernstein, the conductor’s wife, for twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party members at the Bernstein’s apartment in New York. Two reporters, Charlotte Curtis and Tom Wolfe, are present. Bernstein arrives, late. One of the Black Panthers, Donald Cox and Bernstein begin a conversation, which the reporters overhear, about the right or not of Blacks in America, using violence in the fight against oppression in the US. The reporters hear Bernstein say, “I dig it.” The two misquote him. Curtis made it seem as if Bernstein endorsed the idea of Blacks employing violence in the struggle against injustice. Bernstein subsequently tried to explain that he was simply using the language of Cox, who asked Bernstein if he understood-- “you dig.” I understand. May not agree.

Of course, Tom Wolfe has to go one better in an article in which he refers to the “radical chic.” He paints a picture: “America’s Great Conductor trying to talk jive with extremists.” And then Dr. King’s name is invoked, writes Ross. Did Bernstein forget Dr. Martin Luther King!!! (Dr. King, killed just two years before, was hated by many Americans. Where are you my liberal friends? he asked).

Whatever the “particulars,” writes Ross, the music critics wouldn’t be outdone. Following Curtis and particularly the influential Wolfe, critics re-produced unflattering pictures of the Maestro. “Unsympathetic”--to be exact. In the next few days, protesters appeared in front of the Bernstein’s apartment building, throwing “angry letters” at them and their guests.

Ross points out that Leonard Bernstein wouldn’t have been the most “hysterical” person in the room that day in 1970, given that Wolfe’s “fashionably tart prose” made him appear the “mouthpiece” of extremism.

That too, Ross - but whatever happened to the potential to engage all American citizens in discussions about how oppressed groups could respond to violence? What about constructive public conversations that do NOT resort to the usual practice of verbally denouncing and stigmatizing dissenting voices before institutionalizing the practice of incarcerating or justifying the murder of individuals?

Conjuring up an image of 1963, “I Have A Dream,” Dr. King discredits the voices of other Black dissenters noting that America, to use Dr. King’s words, a great purveyor of violence. The intelligence and sensitivity of a Leonard Bernstein would have caught how the disappearance of the discussion on violence surfaces in his vilification in the US media.

Ross continues: The FBI’s COINTELPRO file on Leonard Bernstein dismissed the musician as “foolish,” but it revealed that those “angry letters” thrown at the Bernsteins and their guest - they were fake! Fake! J Edgar Hoover’s operative used their creativity to come up with ways to antagonize. To destroy any potential of uniting the country—then! Before! Now!

III

How do we respond to violence?

Opening night for the theatrical musical, On the Town, is December 28, 1944, and, when the curtains rise, there are Black dancers, musicians, and singers on stage. The violinist is Everett Lee who, midway On the Town’s 462 performances, will be promoted to a conductor. Dorothy Mc Nichols, Frank Neal, Flash Riley, and Royce Wallace exhibit their skills as dancers while Melvin Howard and Lonny Jackson sing to Bernstein’s music.

These Black artists paved the way for others, for many came to work with some of the best-known artists and intellectuals of the postwar era, including figures such as Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte, Duke Ellington, James Earl Jones, Sidney Poiter, Noble Sissle, Billy Strayhorn, and Cicely Tyson.

Bernstein continued his friendship with Everett Lee, after On the Town, inviting the fellow conductor to Tanglewood, in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, the summer of 1946.

And then there’s the Sono Osata. Without fanfare, integrate the cast with Black performers and a Japanese American ballerina by the name of Sono Osato. And this is the 1940s! The 24-year old ballerina’s father was held in a US internment camp for Japanese Americans. Choreographer Jerome Robbins introduced Osata to Bernstein, and the three become friends.

If you are wondering about the Hollywood film version of On the Town - it was whitewashed. No-mixed race casting here! Robbins is out. Gene Kelly becomes the choreographer. Not even Bernstein remains. He’s replaced with Roger Eden.

Bernstein sees. He moves on.

In October, 1961, Bernstein’s West Side Story turns heads with its eclectic rhythm. Broadway was introduced to a little jazz, a little Mambo, a little pop. Bernstein demonstrates that there’s nothing to fear in the rhythm, or the life and culture of others.

Among the immigrant classes, in and around housing tenements, were the children of the newly arrived from the US Territory of Puerto Rico to the mainland and the Irish and Polish from Europe. The Sharks and the Jets. Street gangs. The excluded and the privileged.

Immigrants from Europe, in due time, become Americans while Americans languish in poverty. Dead-end jobs. In West Side Story, Tony, an immigrant of European descent, and Maria, born of American soil, dare to imagine a world in which a place for them to live together exist. Somewhere. But there’s tension everywhere.

That’s why there’s a Tony who is white and a Maria who is Latina. On the one hand, the two reflect the tension within a society that shuns a union across racial difference. On the other hand, both Tony and Maria’s union show what is possible if not just theses two but also society is brave and throws off the shackles of ignorance. There’s a name for this tension, uttered in a tritone: M A R I--A. Tony hears it in the air. Something’s coming! Yes, but from where? Given the pervasive atmosphere of white supremacy, how will this brief uprising of love be received by those who just think as they’re told to think and behavior toward others as they are told to do so?

As William Faulkner knew, fairy-tale endings don’t exist.

At the play’s end, there’s the physically assaulted, the mentally traumatized, the simulation of rape, and the dead. We hear the E major chord, but, Bernstein’s daughter, Jamie Bernstein, calls our attention to the almost faint F#, holding steady, underneath the E chord, suggesting, she says, uncertainty as to when there might be peace. You hear ambiguity and that makes it “dangerous and you don’t know what to expect. It could lead you down a dark path. So that’s pretty ingenious.”

Leonard Bernstein saw race. I’m sure he often wished it were otherwise too.

If only it were otherwise and not so blatant as it is in Arthur Laurent’s 2009 production of West Side Story.

After reviewing Laurent’s production of WSS, a critic, writes conductor and writer, John Mauceri, about a “loving” overture and how it replicates Jerome Robbins’ balletic choreography. Not - writes Mauceri! Jerry and Lenny’s WWS didn’t feature an overture! Furthermore, in 1951, Robbins and Bernstein’s WWS starts with five Jets, dancing whereas the 2009 production is absent of movement. It’s just music. No movement—heaven forbid! And the “nightmare” in Act 2 of the original production - removed in the 2009 production. Of course.

In the 2009, Maurceri points out, for what it’s worth, that Tony’s body is not carried off the stage by both the Jets and the Sharks’ gang members as Robbins and Bernstein staged it in 1951. But, Laurent thought such an ending “unbelievable.” It didn’t occur to Laurent that Robbins and Bernstein saw race, but both envisioned a future in which the unbelievable is the whitewashing of ignorance. Robbins and Bernstein tried to offer an alternative to the violence of hate.

IV

There’s Leonard Bernstein sitting at a picnic table beside Duke Ellington. Trees embrace these two musicians. Teachers. The two are pleased to be in each others company.

Maybe we’re not so departmentalized now, says Bernstein. “Maybe that’s the difference between us,” Duke, - that there’s little difference. “You wrote ‘symphonic jazz’ and I wrote ‘jazz symphonies.”

But maybe there’s no difference, we learn from the footage that last but a few minutes. Maybe there’s no difference…

The Russian-born conductor, Victor Yampolsky, shares his memory of meeting Leonard Bernstein for the first time. Upon arriving in the US, Yampolsky is asked to provide authorities with a letter of recommendation, preferably from a recognized name in the US music scene. Bernstein shares a Russian-Jewish ancestry.

Yampolsky travels to Rome where Bernstein’s producing a concert, “as a personal present to the pope.” So there we are at the Vatican, says Yampolsky. The concert starts. And we hear Bach, the Protestant and his Magnificat! It’s joined by Bernstein’s own Chichester Psalms. Written in Hebrew!

And the choir? It’s a boy’s choir, says Yampolsky, consisting of Black American children, all the way from New Jersey!

Subversive acts, chipping away at white supremacy, are never small! “So that was [the] typical activity of Bernstein.” A man who “was so undiplomatic.” And for any era, it seems, “politically incorrect.”

***

For me, the profound Age of Anxiety, Bernstein’s second symphony, linking poetry to music, music to poetry, is a response to the perpetuation of the irrational and the inhumane of the 20th Century.

If you listen carefully, you can hear how good a teacher was Maestro Leonard Bernstein. So in the 21st Century, what is our reply to violence?