The Unanswered Question II : Musical Syntax (1976)

Bernstein at Harvard

• Released 11 January 1976
• Runtime 1h 36m
• Director Humphrey Burton
• Genres Documentary Music

Synopsis

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: Syntax refers to the study of the structural organization of a sentence, or as Bernstein summarizes, "the actual structures that arise from that phonological stuff."

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