“Everything I do is in one way or another teaching,” Leonard Bernstein (Harvard class of 1939) once told an interviewer. In 1971, he was invited by his alma mater to become the university’s Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry for the next academic year. The prestigious appointment – previously awarded to Stravinsky, Hindemith and Copland as well as to writers including T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and e.e. cummings – required him to deliver a series of six public lectures. The lectures were each given twice, first to the audience in Harvard Square, and afterwards before a small group of listeners at Boston’s WGBH-TV, for broadcast by PBS in the US and by the BBC in the UK. Harvard University Press also published them as a book, but Bernstein insisted that they “were written, not to be read, but listened to.” Originally released by Columbia Masterworks in 6 LP sets in 1974, this 13-CD reissue on the 100th anniversary of his birth would surely have delighted America’s foremost teacher of music.

In the first three lectures, Bernstein analyses music focusing on compositions of the Classical Period (1750-1820). In the fourth lecture, Bernstein analyses music of the Romantic era (c.19th century). The fifth lecture is an exploration of atonality which features Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question as the focus composition. The final lecture features the music of Igor Stravinsky, a composer who Bernstein felt had discovered the answer to this ‘Unanswered Question’. These lectures were widely recognized as an impressive achievement and provided a fresh way to analyse music and interpret musical history. The Norton Lectures stand as a special monument in Bernstein’s legacy.