The Unanswered Question VI : The Poetry of Earth

Name: The Unanswered Question VI : The Poetry of Earth
Genre: Documentary, Music
Released: 1976-01-11
Duration: 178 min
Rating: 9
Cast: Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein at Harvard

9.0 (1)1976-01-112h 58m

DocumentaryMusic

Overview

This series comprised six lectures on music, which cumulatively took the title of a work by Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question. Bernstein drew analogies to other disciplines, such as poetry, aesthetics, and especially linguistics, hoping to make these lectures accessible to an audience with limited or no musical experience, while maintaining an intelligent level of discourse: This lecture takes its name from a line in John Keats' poem, "On the Grasshopper and Cricket". Bernstein does not discuss Keats' poem directly in this chapter, but he provides his own definition of the poetry of earth, which is tonality. Tonality is the poetry of earth because of the phonological universals discussed in lecture 1. This lecture discusses predominantly Stravinsky, whom Bernstein considers the poet of earth.

Budget: $1,000
Revenue: $2,000
Production: Harvard Productions