Inspired by my music theory class, I
decided to listen to the Leonard Bernstein Norton Lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1973 and entitled “The Unanswered Question”.
Turns out they are all on YouTube, so I’ve been binge watching. Bernstein is brilliant and charismatic, and
within the first lecture, he already touched on what we had been learning in
class and reinforced it. By the fourth lecture,
once he has passed through the fundamentals with Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven
and explored the chromatic ambiguity of Belioz, Wagner, and Debussy, he turned
to Schoenberg and atonality. He pointed
out that even in the exploration of atonality, Schoenberg did return to
tonality, as though there was some fundamental longing to inhabit the natural
physical realm of the harmonics of tonal music.
I thought about this today as I walked back into my old lab at UCSF to prepare some samples for a collaborator. After spending these past eight months pursuing my own version of atonality, i.e., music and art classes, would I find the pull of my own natural tonality – genetics – compelling enough to suck me back in? Not sure yet.
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