Communication

Analyzing and understanding Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts from the sources

Often cited as exemplary, the Young People Concerts by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra are part of the tradition of concerts that this orchestra has dedicated to young audiences since 1898 as well as the link it has established with radio and then television. This communication focuses on the first show/concert – What does music mean? using the techniques of both musical and literary genetics. A real genetic file can be made up from the documents kept at the Library of Congress: sketch, handwritten conductor, typewritten conductor… not to mention the television broadcasts (CBS). The different sources will be compared in order to understand what Bernstein’s concerns were when he started this series and what pedagogical and artistic strategies he implemented in order to introduce young audiences to music. This comparison will also make it possible to bring out the aesthetic and political presuppositions of his approach.

Biography

Lucie Kayas is a professor of musical culture at the National Conservatory of Music and Dance in Paris (CNSMDP). Doctor in musicology, specialist in 20th century French music, she has worked on Roussel, Jolivet, Poulenc and Messiaen. At Fayard, she published a biography of André Jolivet (2005) as well as the French translation of the biography of Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone (2008). His catalog raisonné of the work of André Jolivet was published in 2021 (French Society of Musicology).

In charge of the class of Métiers de la culture musicale at the Paris Conservatory, she is also interested in questions of mediation both from a theoretical and practical point of view. For the Philharmonie de Paris, she designed an Opus concert devoted to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and this year produced a series of concert presentations with the Ensemble Orchestre d’Epinal in the Vosges. She is currently preparing a book of interviews with the saxophonist Claude Delangle (Éditions du Conservatoire).