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The Infinite Variety of Music
(Amadeus). With style, wit, and expertise, Leonard Bernstein shares his love and appreciation for music in all its varied forms in The Infinite Variety of Music , illuminating the deep pleasure and sometimes subtle beauty it offers. He begins with an "imaginary conversation" with George Washington entitled "The Muzak Muse," in which he argues the values of actively listening to music by learning how to read notes, as opposed to simply hearing music in a concert hall. The book also features the reproduction of five television scripts from Bernstein on the influence of jazz, the timeless appeal of Mozart, musical romanticism, and the complexities of rhythmic innovation. Also included are Bernstein's analyses of symphonies by Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Brahms, a rare reproduction of a 1957 lecture on the nature of composing, and a report on the musical scene written for the New York Times after his sabbatical leave from directorship of the New York Philharmonic during the 1964-65 season.
286 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1966
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421 people want to read
About the author
Leonard Bernstein
447 books90 followersLeonard Bernstein was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was the first conductor born and educated in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim. He is perhaps best known for his long conducting relationship with the New York Philharmonic, which included the acclaimed Young People's Concerts series, and his compositions including West Side Story, Candide, and On the Town. He is known to baby boomers primarily as the first classical music conductor to make many television appearances, all between 1954 and 1989. Additionally he had a formidable piano technique and was a highly respected composer. He is one of the most influential figures in the history of American classical music, championing the works of American composers and inspiring the careers of a generation of American musicians.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 19, 2009
When I was a kid, somehow I ended up with an extremely worn and old paperback copy of Bernstein's "The Joy of Music." I loved it. I read it over and over again...finally, someone talking to ME (a child) about music!
Despite the fact that this very copy still resides on our bookshelves at home, I kind of forgot about it for years and years.
I read a little blurb recently in Newsweek about recommended books by Alex Ross, the New Yorker magazine music critic and Pulitzer nominee. He listed "Infinite Variety" and all the memories came flooding back. I had to read it.
Bernstein is probably the perfect child ambassador for music (besides me, of course) since his passion for and love of all music is palpable, even on the page. He is funny and personable and direct and unafraid to allow his emotions to get the better of him (which, funnily enough, is probably the criticism most often pointed at him as a conductor). However, I don't know how a kid nowadays would react to the writing. It's a little dated, making references to people and events of which your (even above-) average kid wouldn't be aware. And all the photographs of Bernstein himself standing in front of an audience of children show him smoking a cigarette which, while almost quaintly funny to me in an anachronistic Simpsons-y kind of way, is kind of weird.
That being said, if my daughter shows ANY interest in music (**fingers crossed**, please please please) at any time in her childhood, I will run out and by her her very own copy of both this book and "The Joy of Music."
The only reason I can't give it 5 stars is because the musical scores which are cited as examples have no bar number markings. How am I supposed to know what I should be listening to? I realize that most of these "essays" are actually transcriptions of TV shows, but help a guy out!
Despite the fact that this very copy still resides on our bookshelves at home, I kind of forgot about it for years and years.
I read a little blurb recently in Newsweek about recommended books by Alex Ross, the New Yorker magazine music critic and Pulitzer nominee. He listed "Infinite Variety" and all the memories came flooding back. I had to read it.
Bernstein is probably the perfect child ambassador for music (besides me, of course) since his passion for and love of all music is palpable, even on the page. He is funny and personable and direct and unafraid to allow his emotions to get the better of him (which, funnily enough, is probably the criticism most often pointed at him as a conductor). However, I don't know how a kid nowadays would react to the writing. It's a little dated, making references to people and events of which your (even above-) average kid wouldn't be aware. And all the photographs of Bernstein himself standing in front of an audience of children show him smoking a cigarette which, while almost quaintly funny to me in an anachronistic Simpsons-y kind of way, is kind of weird.
That being said, if my daughter shows ANY interest in music (**fingers crossed**, please please please) at any time in her childhood, I will run out and by her her very own copy of both this book and "The Joy of Music."
The only reason I can't give it 5 stars is because the musical scores which are cited as examples have no bar number markings. How am I supposed to know what I should be listening to? I realize that most of these "essays" are actually transcriptions of TV shows, but help a guy out!
February 18, 2025
It's just bleak. I enjoy Bernstein in many different strata of art and music but nothing in this made me enjoy being a musician.
December 29, 2019
F sharp is F sharp; it doesn't mean anything. It's not like a word. It's not like the word bread, which means something to everyone, no matter how it's used in a poem. F sharp is, as you know of it, the shapest among all tonality in music, and this is the same regardless either in Soviet Union or in the USA. Vladimir Horowitz closed his life in rather F sharp manner in Wagner's Liebestod in Tristan und Isolde, which is written in B major. But, the last arpeggio chord Horowitz plays is F sharp not the written B major tonic. Franz Liszt paraphrased Gounod's Faust once as well in F sharp. F sharp means something, actually unlike Leonard Bernstein's suggestion in this book. F sharp means, if we separate ourselves from tonal orders here once, the highest achieving point in sound arts, the sharpest of all.
And the creative act, if it's really creative, is something that seizes you, and it is creative. It is passive only in the sense that you are somehow a slave of it. By identification with something much further away or closer, depending on how you look at it, something much more inner, so that things will begin to happen. But still there's no guarantee that that's going to turn out F sharps.
I can remember Koussevitzky conducting a Tchaikovsky symphony sometime when he was in his greatest rage. He was very fond of that word. That's why I said it in French, I now realize, because Koussevitzky used to use this word. "En rage," he said. "It vas vunderful tonight, Lenuschka, vas it not? I vas in a rage!" And I knew what he meant. And if you give an earthquake where it is not needed, then you should go back to selling neckties. Yes? Do you mind if I smoke?
Yes, Vladimir Horowitz who was knowing what Leonard Bernstein meant in this book minded when an observer of his recording of Mozart KV 488 concerto told him she liked his necktie, because Mr. Horowitz was trying to play it in F sharp.
Well, I thought I answered that before. That would be the ideal situation, if you could do it. As a matter of fact, the opening of Fancy Free, which is one I like to think of, came to me - just like that - in the Russian Tea Room, when I was having lunch and when I wasn't thinking about anything or lying down anywhere.
This is a rather practical way of trying to remember the fantasy, you see.
If you're looking, nothing will happen. You see, you try to catch yourself when you think you're not looking. There's something schizoid about the whole thing, and, this is why so many composers are loony!
And, get back to the stage the composer was in when he wrote it, through the music you're hearing? Is that what you're trying to say? I guess it's conceivable. That's a very mystical idea. I think that's more mytstical than anything I've said.
And, this was why this was all that Leonard Bernstein had something to say. You need commitment and devotion in highest order to achieve something unattainable in music in prolonged history of our human kind beings. You need to become F sharp.
Leonard Bernstein ends his own forward to this book by writing it on summer solstice of 1966 in Fairfield, Connecticut, "I cannot resist drawing a parallel between the much-proclaimed Death of Tonality and the equally trumpeted Death of God. Curious, isn't it, that Nietzsche issued that particular proclamation in 1883, the same year that Wagner died, supposedly taking tonality to the grave with him? Dear Reader, I humbly submit to you the proposition that neither death is true; all that has died is our own outworn conceptions. The crisis in faith through which we are living is not unlike the musical crisis; we will, if we are lucky, come out of them both with new and freer concepts, more personal perhaps - or even less personal: who is to say? - but in any case with a new idea of God, a new idea of tonality. And music will survive."
He says as well in this book, "Whereas if I did that (Ludwig van Beethoven's 5th symphony) down on Seventh Avenue, I'd be picked up." This is another F sharp is F sharp attitude. Leonard Bernstein imagined of Americas Avenue in his mind as Sixth instead of miserable 7th Avenue for the Carnegie Hall, and that was thinking about 5th symphony in F sharp manner. And, such was part of our history in the last century.
In order to achieve our common goal to be always being ourselves as F sharp as human beings, we need to be diligent in ourselves and this attitude leads us to be humble as beings, "Today's my day to be getting rid of hostilities, and between ten and eleven I shall throw my fit, and by eleven-thirty I'll be all right. You either do or you don't." And, you need to decide this.
And the creative act, if it's really creative, is something that seizes you, and it is creative. It is passive only in the sense that you are somehow a slave of it. By identification with something much further away or closer, depending on how you look at it, something much more inner, so that things will begin to happen. But still there's no guarantee that that's going to turn out F sharps.
I can remember Koussevitzky conducting a Tchaikovsky symphony sometime when he was in his greatest rage. He was very fond of that word. That's why I said it in French, I now realize, because Koussevitzky used to use this word. "En rage," he said. "It vas vunderful tonight, Lenuschka, vas it not? I vas in a rage!" And I knew what he meant. And if you give an earthquake where it is not needed, then you should go back to selling neckties. Yes? Do you mind if I smoke?
Yes, Vladimir Horowitz who was knowing what Leonard Bernstein meant in this book minded when an observer of his recording of Mozart KV 488 concerto told him she liked his necktie, because Mr. Horowitz was trying to play it in F sharp.
Well, I thought I answered that before. That would be the ideal situation, if you could do it. As a matter of fact, the opening of Fancy Free, which is one I like to think of, came to me - just like that - in the Russian Tea Room, when I was having lunch and when I wasn't thinking about anything or lying down anywhere.
This is a rather practical way of trying to remember the fantasy, you see.
If you're looking, nothing will happen. You see, you try to catch yourself when you think you're not looking. There's something schizoid about the whole thing, and, this is why so many composers are loony!
And, get back to the stage the composer was in when he wrote it, through the music you're hearing? Is that what you're trying to say? I guess it's conceivable. That's a very mystical idea. I think that's more mytstical than anything I've said.
And, this was why this was all that Leonard Bernstein had something to say. You need commitment and devotion in highest order to achieve something unattainable in music in prolonged history of our human kind beings. You need to become F sharp.
Leonard Bernstein ends his own forward to this book by writing it on summer solstice of 1966 in Fairfield, Connecticut, "I cannot resist drawing a parallel between the much-proclaimed Death of Tonality and the equally trumpeted Death of God. Curious, isn't it, that Nietzsche issued that particular proclamation in 1883, the same year that Wagner died, supposedly taking tonality to the grave with him? Dear Reader, I humbly submit to you the proposition that neither death is true; all that has died is our own outworn conceptions. The crisis in faith through which we are living is not unlike the musical crisis; we will, if we are lucky, come out of them both with new and freer concepts, more personal perhaps - or even less personal: who is to say? - but in any case with a new idea of God, a new idea of tonality. And music will survive."
He says as well in this book, "Whereas if I did that (Ludwig van Beethoven's 5th symphony) down on Seventh Avenue, I'd be picked up." This is another F sharp is F sharp attitude. Leonard Bernstein imagined of Americas Avenue in his mind as Sixth instead of miserable 7th Avenue for the Carnegie Hall, and that was thinking about 5th symphony in F sharp manner. And, such was part of our history in the last century.
In order to achieve our common goal to be always being ourselves as F sharp as human beings, we need to be diligent in ourselves and this attitude leads us to be humble as beings, "Today's my day to be getting rid of hostilities, and between ten and eleven I shall throw my fit, and by eleven-thirty I'll be all right. You either do or you don't." And, you need to decide this.
May 18, 2017
Some really great insight into the direction of music in the mid-20th century. Enjoyable writing style, if a bit pompous at times!
April 30, 2022
As always, Leonard Bernstein writes in a voice for listeners and experience musicians alike. The heart of this particular book is a set of analyses on various popular classical works, which are so accessible and yet so smart that his skill as both a conductor and writer are on full display. The books ends with a small lecture he gave about his process as a composer, reminding us of the third facet to his talents, and giving the reader a small glimpse of the means of creating music through his short musings on the creative mind.
If you like Bernstein's other works like The Joy of Music, or other non-fiction music titles like How to Listen to Great Music by Robert Greenberg, you might enjoy this book.
If you like Bernstein's other works like The Joy of Music, or other non-fiction music titles like How to Listen to Great Music by Robert Greenberg, you might enjoy this book.
May 25, 2025
Kind of a "4 stars on principle" thing. I feel like Bernstein might have exhausted many of his greatest short-form analyses on music for his Norton lectures (which are King); what you get here feels half-baked on occasion. Perhaps I'm just Way Too Smart For You People, but I thought his analysis of Brahms was almost comically void of content. It was like one of those YouTube essayists who thinks the way to the heart of a piece of music is through cataloguing its every dimension in space. And yet, this is still a very rich text that will at the very least have you listening to a lot of great music again.
August 18, 2025
I think my favorite part is the transcript of a talk to university students at the end, when Bernstein argues that Beethoven's Sixth symphony could be said to illustrate Kafka's The Metamorphosis. He's right!
December 28, 2023
A marvellous read, dipping into the infinite variety of music, and the versatility and the wonderful mind of Bernstein.
November 29, 2024
A re-read. This is one of THE essential books that any classical music lover should own.
June 24, 2025
I wrote of the pitiful biopic Maestro that Lenny was a great musical educator first—conductor second and composer third, West Side Story notwithstanding. Please refer to Exhibit A: The Infinite Variety of Music. The middle section of the book plainly consists of transcripts from his wonderful broadcast series, which are obviously better watched than read; sheet music substitutes hearing the music which, while carefully annotated and probably even more illuminating to study for some, means little to oh philistine me. Yet the animated language and passion still bleeds from every page, and the invaluable content is all there. This also applies to a set of three new symphonic studies. Bookending, there is the joy of Bernstein's imaginary dialogue with George Washington on an aeroplane regarding the state of contemporary American music and musical education—how sweetly optimistic, nearly sixty years on—and another transcript, this of a lecture and Q&A delivered in relation to the composing process, which may be most exciting of all. It's a real treasure.
November 3, 2013
I do not have a very good aural memory which impeded my thoroughly enjoying this book. The book was written from a series of music programmes that Bernstein narrated. He played bits of the music as he analyzed bits of it. Without the music the book is lacking, unless one has a good aural memory. I learned some more about music in general by reading this. My music education is seriously lacking! I am going to try to find the pieces he analyzes and read the book while listening at a later time. Bernstein's enthusiasm for his subject is contagious though.
January 28, 2016
Bernstein was such a lovable geek. Wish there was an audio or video to go with this readily available on the internet.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews