Leonard Bernstein and Frank O'Hara
.jpg)
I just watched Maestro on Netflix—maybe I’m getting old, but I kept checking to see how many minutes were left half-way through. It’s a little over 2 hours. I remembered that Leonard Bernstein was a contemporary of the poet Frank O’Hara and that their orbits had at times crossed. The Brad Gooch biography of O’Hara had two index listings for Bernstein.
There’s a lot of reasons for the connection—both were in New York City and social gadflys in their own right. One of the mentions in City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara has Bernstein as team captain in a game of charades that O’Hara sat out. It is likely in the New York social scene for gay men that they shared many of the same friends.
When Frank O’Hara entered Harvard after World War II his
intention was to study music and composition. He was a trained classic pianist.
While reading the Gooch biography I couldn’t help but think, like a lot of
young people with artistic passions, that studying the arts after a while feels
like a disconnect. My daughter in high school loved taking photos and took many
extra-curricular classes at Marwen. Eventually, though, she decided not to
pursue photography on an academic level. Also Harvard doesn’t seem like the
logical choice—perhaps Julliard or Berklee College of Music in Boston. Anyway,
he switched majors. He would continue to attend concerts and write poems about
music, continuing to express his passion for Rachmanioff (“On Rachmaninoff's
Birthday"), for Billy Holiday ("The Day Lady Died"), "Ode
to Joseph LeSueur" - Aaron Copland's "Piano Fantasy",
"Macaroni" - Maria Callas, "The 'Unfinished'" - Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals,
"Naphtha" - Duke Ellington, "To the Music of Paul Bowles" -
Paul Bowles, and a host of others. I sourced these entries from:
https://kaitlynmote.wixsite.com/artifact3/post/allusions-to-musicians-in-frank-o-hara-s-poetry
Leonard Bernstein was celebrated as America’s conductor in a
time when America was striving to define itself, reaching to leave its own
unique fingerprints on the classics—from the Library of Congress entry for
Bernstein:
In his musical works, Bernstein consistently recast traditional compositional models in a distinctively American musical language, freely using elements inspired by American popular styles and jazz; his theater works exhibited the social consciousness inherent in the works of Blitzstein and Brecht.
It was a heady time with Frank O’Hara writing I do this, I
do that poems and Aaron Copeland composing Appalachian
Spring borrowing melodies from Shaker hymns, and Thelonious Monk’s jazz improvisations.
The intersection of artists during this time in New York City is head-spinning.
Comments