Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.

Although Leonard Bernstein wrote music in a variety of genres and styles, he was unusual in that he consistently created music infused with a Jewish flavour, whether consciously or not, throughout his career. Bernstein’s Jewish background has provided ample fodder for numerous articles and books, but most scholars are unaware of the true significance of his childhood synagogue in Boston, Congregation Mishkan Tefila. Its rabbi, Herman Rubenovitz (1883−1966), the cantor, Iszo Glickstein (1891−1947), and especially its music director, Solomon Braslavsky (1887−1975), made a lifelong impression on Bernstein. Mishkan Tefila served as the venue for some of Bernstein’s earliest piano performances, and he heard an organ and a choir here for the first time; it continued to serve as a Jewish anchor for him even as an adult. In the absence of early formal musical training, the synagogue became, in effect, Bernstein’s conservatory, and these three men his professors.

In his 2015 interview with John Palmer, James MacMillan makes a distinction between ‘conviction composers’, and ‘others, like me’ who ‘sometimes struggle with conviction’. It is understandable that giving convincing musical expression to strong religious beliefs might be harder in textless concert works than in liturgical settings, and MacMillan seems to have relished the possible contrasts between concert works that are associated with religious topics and those where any engagement with extra-musical themes is less explicit. Two of the three numbered string quartets have titles, and the second has religious connotations that deal with the ‘drama’ of the Jewish Seder Night rituals. The first quartet can also be interpreted as dramatic, and it could well have been an impatience with this aspect that led MacMillan, in a reference to his third quartet, to declare that he was conscious of ‘leaving the extra-musical starting points behind’, writing music that ‘was just the notes and nothing but the notes’. My analysis of all three quartets explores the possibilities of narrative and characterisation in the light of stylistic and expressive qualities that seem to resist any aspirations to pure abstraction, even when direct connections with MacMillan’s more ‘mainstream’ texted compositions are less obvious.