To Jay, in the absence of Lennie...

Initially this was going to be an open letter to the ghost of Leonard Bernstein.

But I decided that if I'm going to write an open letter, I'd rather address it to a live guy than a dead one.

Bernstein died in October, 1990. He lives on in my music library, among my book collection and even among my videos (his 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard.) But he's stopped returning calls.

Jay Nordlinger, who lives in Manhattan (natch) is a columnist for the conservative website National Review Online. But he also writes classical-music reviews, and often links to them from NRO. And he's very much alive, thank you.

In other words, Jay, you and I share a love for great music. So dude, I'm talkin' in your direction...

By the way, don't you agree with me that it's a little unfair, after his having given the world so many sublime moments of music, that the one thing most people bother remembering about poor Lennie, if they remember him at all, is the moment he made a gigantic jackass of himself?

You know the moment I'm talking about: when he donned a Nehru jacket and threw a cocktail party for the Black Panthers. After which, Tom Wolfe, to borrow an image from T.S. Eliot, pinned Lennie "wriggling to the wall" in his essay Radical Chic for this public brain fart. It was subsequently burned into the public's memory of Bernstein.

I prefer to remember Lennie conducting Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes at the last concert he gave before he died. Really, this is one of the gems of my CD collection.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here's what I really want to talk about: I know we're well into the 21st century now (Year VII, if you want to count Year 0) and it's a bit late to be writing postmortems on the 20th century. But still, don't you agree that it's mighty fine to sit back, take a deep breath and enjoy the fact that that bloody century is over? I mean "bloody" in the cockney sense as well as the literal one: in addition to all of the will-to-power grotesqueries the 20th century gave us, the Hitler-Stalin-Mao-Pol Pot stuff, it also gave us the full flowerings of some ideas which, I'm happy to say, are now fading into disrepute.

Marxism is refusing to go quietly, for some reason, and the reason I suspect is that so many so-called "intellectuals," from Harvard to the Sorbonne, (not to mention Hollywood) mortgaged the farm to buy into it, and are reluctant to admit that they were flim-flammed.

Einstein's physics are still with us, until Stephen Hawking comes up with something better. But I have no problem with the theory of relativity, do you? Some have argued that it ultimately gave rise to the angst of "moral relativism," but I think that's a stretch at best. Yeah, OK, the first thing we did with Einstein's ideas was to build a bomb with them, but that's hardly his fault. He gave us a tool to measure our world with. Blessings on his head.

Here's one guy I'm glad to see ride off into the sunset: Freud. (Vladimir Nabokov, who no doubt resented the implication that there was something wrong with him because his childhood in St. Petersburg had been so happy, dismissed Freud as "The Viennese quack.") After exerting quasi-religious authority for most of the last century (and costing Woody Allen untold millions in bills to psychoanalysts) Freud is fading. PC might have something to do with this; all of Freud's dark stuff about infant sexuality, oedipal obsessions and the like do not run with the grain of today's "new puritanism," nor of feminist gender politics--Freud was, after all (shudders!) a man. But I think it's more a question of perspective. I mean, look at Woody Allen, for example. Does he look like an example of someone who's been cured? He's a perfect poster boy for consumers of psychoanalysis: spending to stand still. I wonder whether Freud ever did anything for anyone that a bartender couldn't do. Or even a priest. If Woody gets any less goofy in his old age, it's probably old age at work, not psychoanalysis.

And then there's serialism. Yeah, serialism. I finally got to my real point. I want to talk about 12-tone music. That's why I'm writing to you, Jay, and not to Jonah Goldberg or E.J. Dionne.

I'm not here necessarily to trash 12-tone music, just to say I'm glad to see it shuffling off to Buffalo, or wherever it is ideas whose time has past shuffle off to.

Not all of it was bad; a couple of weeks ago the Metropolitan Opera staged Berg's Wozzeck. I'm not going to pretend I listened to it, but I've heard parts of it and yes, it is an emotional battering ram. ("Du! du! Dein Mutter ist tot!" Geez.)

My problem with 12-tone music is that, looking back, it was music's version of Freudianism in the 20th century. Academia threw its arms around it, and therefore anyone who didn't get on the bandwagon was dismissed as a rube, or worse, a "reactionary." In that respect, serialism had as much in common with Marxism as with Freud, and it strikes me as so ironic that it was banned in the Soviet Union, where the real philistines were running the government. Glenn Gould, a great proponent of such composers as Schoenberg and Krenek, proudly let it be known that melody was relatively unimportant to him, and he spoke for much of academia: serialism was so cool partly because it appealed to such a small group. It was an aesthetic with a "priesthood." To be a proponent of 12-tone music made you "in the know," somehow more enlightened than those beyond-the-pale hicks who wanted only tunes they could hum.

I had my own response, cocked and ready for use any time someone accused me of arch-hickdom for preferring Mozart to Schoenberg (which is not to say I'm down on Schoenberg, but I'll get to that in a second.) I'm always ready to say to such people, "Look, I'm not necessarily asking you to give me something I can hum. But for God's sake, would you give me something I can remember?" I can't hum the opening movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, but I can't forget it either. Since 12-tone music dispenses with tonal relationships based on the harmonic series, and for that reason is bereft of almost anything the average ear would recognize as a "tune," it is therefore that much more incumbent upon the non-tonal composer to give the listener the sort of dramatic experience he or she can take away and remember. Alban Berg seems almost alone among the 12-tone crowd in having understood this.

In a way, it sort of gets us back to the old Wagner-vs.-Verdi argument: which is more important in opera, drama or song? Historian Will Durant summed it up this way: "May neither side win."

Fair enough. But 12-tone music itself arose in response to problems raised by Wagner. After Tristan und Isolde, what territory was left for chromaticism to cover, if contained within a tonal framework? Over the next thirty years, composers ranging from Debussy to Mahler wrestled with the problem in their various idiosyncratic ways. Finally Schoenberg came up with his solution, which, in the great teutonic tradition, must needs be a System. It's been said of the French that they can't do anything without a theory. Germans seem similarly addicted to systems.

At any rate, Schoenberg developed his serial technique over a period of about a decade as a way of giving the next generation of composers a workable, viable alternative to writing "in keys." And it seemed to answer the questions adequately enough: it was "progressive" (why do left-wing buzzwords keep working their way into a discussion of music?) in the sense that it led away from the old world and into the new--serial music was guaranteed not to sound like Beethoven or Strauss, no matter how badly you blundered--and it also seemed the logical continuation of the Austro-Germanic, romantic-chromatic tradition.

In other words, it seemed great on paper. Just like Freud. Unfortunately "seemed" is an operative word here. The quackings and squawkings of atonal composers may have sounded like music from outer space, but simply because they were following the great romantic-chromatic tradition, it could have been argued that it was they, and not the Stravinskys of the world who sought to save tonality by pumping new life into it, who were the true conservatives.

But I'll leave that argument for another day.

The 12-tone system did give the world some memorable music (although not very much.) I can think of only one 12-tone piece that I have listened to over and over, with pleasure, for years: Alban Berg's Violin Concerto. And anyone who knows this piece also knows that it bestrides the two worlds of tonal and non-. Its opening notes are those of the strings of an open violin. In its second movement it quotes a Bach chorale, note-for-note. It waltzes. It thrashes around in turbulent 20th-century waters, but also looks tenderly backward.

In other words, it's a great work of drama.

I've listened to tons of Schoenberg. I used to have an album of his complete piano music, played by Maurizio Pollini, which I wish I still had. Not because I loved it, but because I liked to listen to it now and then just to be hearing something different. The one Schoenberg piece that ever came close to gaining my affection was his Piano Concerto, and for what serialists would say was the wrong reason. Schoenberg has been called a "revolutionary conservative," and admitted himself that nostalgia for tonality haunted him every day of his life. Such nostalgia is on display in the Piano Concerto. After listening to it, I wrote to my pianist friend Charles Berigan that "except for having no key signature, it could be Brahms." Charlie agreed.

I have also listened to Webern. Boulez. Kirschner. Webern exploits certain timbres that prick up your ear, but is that music, or is it just "I hear an interesting sound?" Boulez absolutely puts me to sleep. I bought a copy of Pli selon Pli when I was about 23, and over the next two decades tried repeatedly to listen to it. I could never get past side one without dozing. I'm sure there's some professor of composition at the Curtis Institute who positively yanks his crank when he hears this stuff, but to me, (and I'm afraid I speak for millions of hicks and rubes who buy concert tickets) it has the same effect as chloroform. Leon Kirschner's 1963 Piano Concerto may be a masterfully-crafted work, but every time I hear it, it's like I'm hearing it for the first time. And I don't mean that as a compliment. It's so forgettable that by the time I got around to playing it for the third time, I'd forgotten what it sounded like the first and second times.

It might be added that serialism was like certain kinds of wine--it didn't travel well. My friend Berigan observed that while Schoenberg's system was probably a perfect idea for its time and place, that time and place was fin-de-siecle Vienna. You can connect a series of logical dots from Schubert to Schoenberg without leaving town. By contrast, 12-tone music had little or nothing to do with the New World experience. It didn't find particularly fertile ground in the United States, and by the end of the 20th century, American composers from John Corigliano to Aaron Jay Kernis (a conservatory classmate in the '70s of my pal Charlie, by the way) were looking in directions other than dodecaphony.

In any case, non-tonal music has had 95 years to find itself an audience (Schoenberg's earliest experiments with atonality date from 1911) and it has failed to do so, except among what Tom Lehrer once called "Ivory-covered professors in ivory-covered halls." Jay, I think if anyone out there is still arguing spiritedly in favor of serialism, and likely to condemn me as a boob and a moron for these comments, I'd like to ask you a favor: sound the buzzer. Because I think this particular game is now in overtime.

And if you'll excuse me, I'm off now to re-experience a true 20th-century masterwork in a recording that I added to my collection just this week: Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony.

Somehow, I think Lennie would approve that choice. Don't you?

See ya later,

Kelley