Howard Gardner © 2025
When I—as a promising young pianist—was growing up in Scranton Pennsylvania in the 1950s, there was no figure in contemporary classical music who was as salient, as charismatic, as Leonard Bernstein (almost always called his nickname “Lenny.”) Lenny was already legendary: he had become an instant celebrity in 1943 when on a few hours notice, he had skillfully conducted the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Lenny was a composer of serious classical music; the brilliant creator of the scores for West Side Story and On the Waterfront; the much acclaimed conductor of the “New York Phil;” and an educator in the arts without equal. Millions of young people, including me, looked forward on Saturday morning television to his introductions to the world of classical music.
Also, as I grew older, I sensed personal ties. Like me, Lenny was Jewish and proudly so. He attended Harvard College (as did I) at a time when not many Jews had been admitted. He was also sympathetic to left-wing causes and critical of authoritarian regimes. In the mid-1970s, at the height of his unequaled career, he returned to Harvard to give the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures—where he sought to analyze classical music using the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. I eagerly attended his lectures. And then, after the final lecture, I was privileged to be invited with a small group of friends and colleagues to a conversation with “Maestro.” Without question, he was the star—and he acted as one might have expected. Probably too intimidated to say anything substantive, let alone argumentative, I did engage in a brief conversation with him—though I would be amazed if it made any impression on him whatsoever.
Bernstein did not take good care of himself physically—to put it mildly—and he died too early, at the age of 72. A year or two before his death, he performed Brahms’ First Symphony at Tanglewood— the greatest live performance that I’d ever heard—perhaps of any major symphony. And it turned out that Joseph Horowitz, a classical music critic for The New York Times agreed with that evaluation.
Sadly, today most young people know of Bernstein only through the recent sensational biopic Maestro. (Alas, that’s the way that posterity will remember most personalities—JFK, Churchill—and most events—Pearl Harbor, The Titanic, 9/11.)
Little did I ever expect that I was linked to Leonard Bernstein in another way. In turns out that shortly before his death, Bernstein gave a rare lengthy interview to Jonathan Cott, a journalist quite knowledgeable about classical music. Among the many things Bernstein mentioned, was this:
“In an essay entitled ‘Children’s Conceptions (and Misconceptions) of the Arts,’ the psychologist Howard Gardner wrote: ‘We would not expect children to learn to understand computers by having them examine a terminal or a printout. Yet that is the way we expect the young to become sensitive to ballet, theater, and the visual arts. Schools bus them to plays and museums; Leonard Bernstein offers youth concerts on television; and somehow artistic understanding is supposed to result.’ And Gardner doesn’t seem to believe that it will. But, as I said in the six lectures I gave at Harvard University in 1973 [published in the book The Unanswered Question], all kids are born with a language and a musical competence. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to account for a two-year-old child’s saying, ‘I like the green ice cream better’ in any language, whether it’s in Swahili or in Dutch. Every child can say it in the language of its parents—'I like the green ice cream better.’ That’s the Pentecostal alphabet I was speaking about before—the letters of fire that God gave us. The greatest gift he could give man was the ability to talk and communicate. And a big part of communication is music.
Every kid is born with a sense of rhythm and has the ability to tune in on the overtone series. It’s part of the air we breathe, part of our bodies. The harmonic series is in everybody—the octave, the fifth, the fourth, the third, the major and minor seconds. This is provable through physical principles. An infant knows the interval of an octave because his or her mother sings a note or a melody one octave higher than the father does. And every kid knows the fifth, and every kid knows the first two different overtones of the harmonic series. In every country of the world, kids tease each other with the same tune: nya-nya, nya-nya—the first two different overtones of the harmonic series. And every child is born with the knowledge of one-two, one-two—he has two hands, two feet, two eyes, he knows two nipples in his mother’s breasts, he breathes in and out, he knows up and down, left and right, and he can march: toddle-toddle, toddle-toddle!”
This blog introduces my first mea culpa. Foolishly and unnecessarily, I had “put down” the very young persons’ concerts from which I – and countless others—had gained so much. I had been searching for examples of “one night stands” in the arts—attending ONE art exhibit, participating in ONE dance, attending ONE concert. Unless the child is unusually gifted or has prior interests and inclinations that are consonant with that single exposure, it’s unlikely to have much effect…let alone any long-term impact. But of course, Lenny’s Saturday morning shows were designed to be seen as a whole series—and not as a one-shot exposure. A poorly selected and insufficiently articulated example on my part. No doubt there are scattered examples of young people who are inspired by a single powerful artistic experience—“chance favors the prepared mind.”
On the other hand: Bernstein was actually dwelling on another one of his favorite points—one brought up frequently over the course of the Cott Conversations. And that is his theory of cognitive development—a field in which I do have expertise. Bernstein wanted to expound—indeed to glorify—the mind and spirit of every child: openness to new experiences; willingness to play (physically or mentally) with whatever information is presented; often a keen memory for sensory and motor experiences; a desire to create, to build upon, whatever information proves enticing.
In the best of all worlds, Bernstein’s depiction has validity. As so many developmental psychologists have demonstrated, the minds—and the brains—of young children are amazing entities. But two qualifying points are necessary:
Bernstein with wife Felicia Montealegre and two of their children
Most children throughout the world and throughout history were not born and raised in supportive conditions—and so the ideal just sketched is unlikely to be realized. Bernstein may well have had in mind his own three children—who had heredity (their mother was an internationally acclaimed singer), environment, historical era, and location (the upper West side of Manhattan) on their side.
There are profound individual differences in cognitive profiles. While even children who are hearing-impaired can gain something from music or dance, not every child has—or can develop—a notable musical intelligence. Indeed, I’ve been married to two women—both of them far more artistic than I am or could ever be—but neither of them was able to carry or recognize a familiar tune. And while Leonard Bernstein’s concerts might well have appealed to them, they would likely not have benefited from them in the way that I (and others with ampler amounts of musical intelligence) could and did.
Being immigrants who had escaped from Nazi Germany in the nick of time, my parents had no money and no time for the arts. But when I was five years old, we visited a family in the neighborhood, and I simply began to pick out tunes on the piano. A parent in that family said “You must buy a piano for Howard!”—and so my parents scrounged up $30 (yes, thirty dollars!), bought an upright piano, and supported my piano lessons for the next six years—at which time, I stopped formal lessons but continued to play, and even to teach piano for decades. So, I was the kind of child that Lenny had in mind—but he universalized “musical intelligence” in a way that was aspirational rather than typical.
Lenny is long dead, and I am well into my ninth decade. We’ll not be able to continue this conversation, but thanks to the internet, I’ve at least had the chance to respond to one of my lifelong heroes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For comments on an earlier version of this blog, I thank Shinri Furuzawa, Annie Stachura, and Ellen Winner.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, L. (1976). The unanswered question: Six talks at Harvard. Harvard University Press.
Cott, J. (2013). Dinner with Lenny: The last long interview with Leonard Bernstein. Oxford University Press.
Horowitz, J. (1985, July 22). Music at Tanglewood: Bernstein and Brahms. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/22/arts/music-at-tanglewood-bernstein-and-brahms.html