Music 194rs: Before West Side Story: Leonard Bernstein's Boston

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2006
Undergraduate/graduate seminar co-taught with Carol J. Oja. This seminar explored the childhood and early career of one of the 20th century’s most renowned musicians and composers. Working in teams, students fused ethnography and archival research to explore the interlinking communities and institutions (Mishkan Tefila synagogue, Boston Latin High School, Harvard class of ’39, the BSO) that shaped Bernstein’s formative years. Students from the course presented papers the following fall for Harvard’s Bernstein Festival, and many of those papers were published in a special issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music (2009).