What is Unanswered Question by Bernstein Harvard one and can someone summarize the beginning of the first lecture?

Answer 1

"The Unanswered Question" is the title of a series of lectures Leonard Bernstein gave when he held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship of poetry at Harvard University in 1973. Bernstein took his title from a work by the American composer Charles Ives, who, Bernstein noted, probably meant the phrase in a metaphysical sense. Bernstein asked it in a musical sense: "Whither music?" The first lecture lays out his somewhat abstruse and (as he acknowledges) unverifiable notion of a universal "musical phonology," an innate musical grammar or language in the human species. Bernstein had been reading Noam Chomsky and the cutting-edge linguistic theorists of the day, and was clearly eager to apply some of their concepts to music. It is a fascinating performance, fizzing with ideas and possessed of a truly inspirational passion--even if, in the end, Bernstein fails to convince us of his argument. Well worth reading, or, better yet, watching, as the lectures were videotaped.