Chapter 12 - Popular Music

Summary

Bernstein was a popular figure, in the conventional sense of garnering attention and admiration from a great many people, but his relationship to popular music was hardly straightforward. Bernstein expressed scepticism about much of popular music from the 1960s on and his personal taste hewed to the musics of his youth, such as swing-era jazz, blues, and the Golden-era of Broadway and popular song, while occasionally expanding to include rock’n’roll. However, Bernstein also viewed popular music as a kind of wellspring that composers could draw from, whether it was Mozart’s Magic Flute or his own West Side Story. Not only could borrowing from popular music revitalize tonal classical music for the twentieth century, as opposed to twelve-tone serialism and other mid-century modernist trends, but Bernstein also firmly believed that popular musics, particularly jazz, were the key to creating a uniquely American musical style.