Michael Shapiro: Welcome to Interplay, Conversations in Music. This is Michael Shapiro, your host. And I'm pleased to say that I have not only a special guest, but a dear, dear friend, Jamie Bernstein. Thank you for joining me, Jamie.
Jamie Bernstein: It's my pleasure.
Michael Shapiro: Good to see you.
Jamie Bernstein: Nice to see you, Michael.
Michael Shapiro: Good to see you so much. You know, we have been talking about, uh, what comes around is still around. And, you know, not only with the pestilence, which is kind of like the plague of 1650 all over again, but Black Lives Matter and thinking back to the 60s, in which I know your family was very involved, even before then, in human rights. And your work, I know, with bringing song and music to young people for so many years through not only your personal work, but also Crescendo, your great movie, which is on Netflix now.
Talk to me about your feelings. I know that you are a writer, and I've read, obviously, much of your work. You're on your website, the short items, but also the recent book, which has done so well across the country, which I read in one day, Famous Father Girl. I am a groupie, of course, of what has happened, being an American composer and conductor, and the influence of LB is major. But I want to talk to you about writing because The Famous Father Girl and your writings on your website is in your voice, because I know your voice, and I've spent a lot of time with you over the years. When you sit down and write, what's the process? And where does the voice come from?
Jamie Bernstein: Well, writing and speaking are kind of one thing for me, and reading. Um, when I read a book, I'm basically reading it out loud to myself in my head, which makes me a very slow reader. And my father had the same issue too. He he could only read as fast as he could hear. And so, when it comes to my own writing, I'm hearing the writing in my head too. So the speaking and the reading and the writing and the talking, it's all one thing. So it's not a surprise that my writing voice sounds a lot like my speaking voice because they really are one and the same for better or for worse.
Michael Shapiro: I, uh, have a question for you, having to do with, um, the writing style, though. When I read Famous Father Girl and when I read your other writings, I hear your voice immediately. And it's not somebody else's voice, it's not your brother or sister's voice or Menachem Begin's voice, it's your voice. I noticed immediately. Is there an audiobook version of Famous Father Girl?
Jamie Bernstein: You betcha, and I did it. Nobody else could have done it. I would have been aghast if Harper Collins had announced to me that some other person would have been, uh, doing my audiobook because it's in my voice. So I felt completely natural, uh, doing the audiobook. It it felt completely correct, and I love when people listen to my book rather than read it, because I feel like they're getting an even more authentic experience that way.
Michael Shapiro: Well, you can't autograph my book because I I read it on Kindle. Uh, but after COVID-19, I can hug you and thank you for the book because it's amazing. Because it's it's no holds barred at all. And the reminiscences, obviously, of the famous father are good, but I find them wonderful and interesting and fascinating, and your revelations are amazing. But I love reading about your mom. Um, because I did not know her. I did not I didn't know your father slightly. Uh, but I I did never met your mother. And I have a sense that her image in you shines as bright, if not brighter, than your father. Can you speak about her?
Jamie Bernstein: Oh, well, I'm glad you got a good impression of her from my book because that means I did my job, because I was trying to I was trying to convey how rare she was, how multifarious and interesting and troubled, melancholy, witty, funny as can be. She was so many things, and her friends just adored her. And it's really hard to convey in writing the essence of a person, uh, and I was trying very hard to do this with both my parents. So if people came away from reading or listening to my book with a sense of who my parents were, then I I did my job. And the thing about my mother was that she was from Chile, you know, from South America. She raised us bilingual. She was a pianist and an actress and a fabulous painter. She was so multi-talented. And, uh, so so there was this tremendous creative spirit that she brought to all of us, but in addition to that, she really gave us the stability and the glue that kept the family together through all of the mishigas that we went through, uh, over the decades. So I really give her all the credit for making us a family that really continues to be a family. That's her legacy.
Michael Shapiro: Because you're very, very close to your brother and sister. I've seen that when I've been together with the three of you. It's a wonderful relationship that you've got. No question about it.
Jamie Bernstein: Yeah, we refer to ourselves as the three-headed monster.
Michael Shapiro: Well, you're all very different. I want to talk to you about Catholicism and Judaism. Because both run through you. Um, your mother, I think, am I right, had last rites and was a Catholic funeral?
Jamie Bernstein: She did go back to the Catholic church at the end of her life. When she and my father married, she took the vows of Rachel, as I believe they are called, and there's a ketubah and everything. Uh, so she ostensibly converted to Judaism when she got married to my dad. But in practice, it it was not quite so rigorous for either one of them. Um, they like many, uh, Jewish people in the United States, they kind of cobbled their own way of being Jewish, and, um, it was very secular, really. And when it came to holidays, you know, we did a little of this, a little of that. We had the Hanukkah candles, but we also had a Christmas tree, and we still have these rip-roaring fantastic Seders, pulling out all the stops. And then on Easter Sundays, we would have egg hunts for the kids, who are now grown up.
Michael Shapiro: You did the both. Oh, in my family as well. My my my, uh, with my first wife, Greek Orthodox, both traditions. I'm very familiar with this. But I'm curious for you as a human being and a writer, you come from a mother who was aesthetic and had these beautiful visions, I think. And a father who wanted to act like a rabbi a lot and questioned everything. So, do you find in yourself, I mean, I think about my parents all the time. I lost them fairly recently. By the way, their names were Sam and Jean. Real close to your grandparents, Sam and Jenny. I always found that to be the weirdest thing. But, do you find in yourself as you run through these the issues of life now, your reactions to things, and you're bringing up your two children, do you find that the remnants of the things you were taught, religiously first, aesthetically second, remain compelling for you? Or do you say to yourself, enough already, I'm going in this direction. Maybe I come off of where I've been, but there's more to me than just that.
Jamie Bernstein: I would say that the aesthetics came first and the religion came second in terms of importance and and stature as we were growing up. It was the music. It was the beauty of of artistic expression that that was the closest that my parents came to expressing their spiritual lives for themselves and for us as a family. And the and, you know, religious expression came second. We didn't belong to a synagogue. We didn't go regularly to shul or church. So it was really, uh, in the music that we felt the the thing that's bigger than all of us, that that sense of of spiritual connection.
Michael Shapiro: Yeah, well, the spiritual connection certainly. You know, um, Naxos has a series, the Milken Archive of of Jewish American music, which I'm a part of and your father is a part of, focusing on the so-called Jewish music that we have both created and many, many other composers. Um, you even have, you have even identified the beginning notes of West Side Story being the...
Jamie Bernstein: Shofar.
Michael Shapiro: Ta.
Jamie Bernstein: Ta-da.
Michael Shapiro:
Jamie Bernstein: Um, my dad, it those are the opening notes of the Candide overture, too. Same idea. It's a big announcement. It's it's a fanfare. Here comes the important thing.
Michael Shapiro: Tequiyah. Tequiyah. Tequiyah. And you know the names of pieces that are that way. But getting back to Jamie. As I mentioned to you, I was so taken, and read in one day, Famous Father Girl, which is a great title. Which you got to--
Jamie Bernstein: Thank you very much, classmate in second grade, Lisa, who called me that to tease me.
Michael Shapiro:
Jamie Bernstein: She didn't like me.
Michael Shapiro: But when we had dinner before the pestilence, with friends, you told me that you had ideas of different kinds of writing. And I love talking to you about expression, above everything else. And we have a lot of else to talk about with family and everything else, and friends and people we know in common, places we love like the Southwest, which we shall get to. But you said you were thinking about writing something else that was coming from a different place. And I'm curious about what that is and if you can tell us on the QT, thinking that this is going to be seen by a few thousand people, where are you going with your writing? That's what I'm curious about.
Jamie Bernstein: Well, thank you for asking. For the past year, I've been working on a new thing, and it's also personal, non-fiction. And, uh, my original concept, which I've now written 10 chapters of, virtually a whole book was already there. Um, every chapter is a a different body part. That was my original idea. And, uh, but of course there are many other things going on. But I found that when the pestilence arrived, it was really like it pulled the plug on every all my assumptions. And I'm sure that so many of us feel this way. There are so many things we took for granted. The sheer act of gathering. I never stopped to be grateful for it or to prize it or to, you know, think of it as a special gift in my life, and it's gone. Um, the sheer fact of attending a musical performance and theater, we took it for granted. We didn't, you know, treasure it. We didn't, we just assumed it would be a thing we could always do. So all all of this and more has really changed my attitude to what I was writing. Um, and I have had to go back and revisit the whole thing and put it in a new context that takes into account what we're going through now and will be going through for quite some time. The world is changed, it's different. So, uh, you know, one of the things that creative artists must always be struggling with now, not just me, is how do you sustain the the the illusion that what you're doing is important for long enough to get to the conclusion of creating it? I call this the golden blind spot, and you have to have it at all times as an artist. I mean, this preceded COVID-19. You you every artist needs to have the golden blind spot in order to sustain the illusion that what they're doing is worthy and important so that they can get through to the end of it.
Michael Shapiro: You know, the illusion, the illusion to the conclusion sounds almost like a Danny Kaye movie. I just want to remind you. But--
Jamie Bernstein: The illusion, so you can get to the conclusion. Anyway, you know, I my golden blind spot comes and goes.
Michael Shapiro: It's magnificent. It's magnificent. No, I know, I know it's part of you and that's why we always enjoy talking, and we just talk and talk and talk and talk until we can't talk anymore. But if you look at somebody like Primo Levi, who wrote those short books after the war on the Shoah, on the Holocaust, which to me are the, even above Elie Wiesel, they're the most amazing books written.
Jamie Bernstein: I agree.
Michael Shapiro: Right?
Jamie Bernstein: And look how he ended up.
Michael Shapiro: Jumped out a window.
Jamie Bernstein: I think he lost his golden blind spot for keeps.
Michael Shapiro: For keeps.
Jamie Bernstein: Anyway, it's really hard to sustain it now because, you know, the the other illusion that we live with, all of us, is that we have control over our lives, and we can make plans, and we can formulate how things are going to be in the future, and we can really fool ourselves for days, weeks at a time that we are in control of our existence. And then along comes COVID, and it strips bare, it strips away all the illusions, and we have to utterly and daily confront the fact that we are not in control of our lives at all. And I mean, we we all know that at at some level, but we're able to, you know, kind of fudge it as we go along. But there's no fudging now. We have to look it in the eye every single day.
Michael Shapiro: Yes. I hate to bring this up, but I can talk to you from personal experience. Both of us are orphans. I call us orphans because we no longer have our parents alive. Both your father and my father were both born in 1918, strangely enough. And they're gone. One thing that people talk about, uh, and there's there have been books written about it, are the various stages of grief and grieving. As you know, about rage and remembrance, and suffering, and then the long period of outrage. I still am outraged that my parents are no longer with me, even though they died at 96 and 97, which is very old. So you must have felt the same thing with your folks. But now, I'm hearing from artists, pianists I'm talking to, conductors, but especially the the performers who are saying they're not even practicing. Or they stopped. I know that the first when it first started, I they got sick with COVID pneumonia, different story. But initially, before I got sick, I wasn't writing at all. I stopped. I was just comple-- I was like, . And I only went back to it after I recovered, almost recovered from the pneumonia, from COVID pneumonia, did I get back to writing music? And now I'm writing very fiercely. And it's one of the things that got me out of the hospital when I was there, in very bad shape, was the just, I got to get back, I got to finish these pieces, I got to write my big opera, which I'll tell you about offline. I got to just do it, I got to do it, I got to do it. And it pushed, I got to see my kids, I got to see my grandsons, I got to get out of here. Talk to me about rage, remembrance, anguish, shutting down, talking about this moment you're you're seeking now to jump back into the writing.
Jamie Bernstein: Well, I it took me a long time to jump back into it. Jump is not the right verb. It was more like, like kind of sidle back over to it. And, uh, what I've been doing, and I hope it works, is I've just been rewriting the introduction to the book. My feeling being that if I can, you know, wrestle the context into something that works for me, then that will kind of set the table for me to go back and revisit all the individual chapters so that they all line up with this new, uh, context. So we'll we'll see if that works. Um, it's slow going but at least I'm working on something, so that's good news. I've also written quite a lot of poetry, actually.
Michael Shapiro: You've always been a poet, you've been a lyricist and a poet.
Jamie Bernstein: Yep, I've always been a poet, but I never used to write sestinas and villanelles.
Michael Shapiro: Wow.
Jamie Bernstein: And, you know, they're like puzzles. They have all these rules and regulations about the the rhyme scheme and the repeating words, and there are all these sort of special rules and regulations. Um, and they always remind me of that expression, those wise restraints that make us free.
Michael Shapiro: I love it. But you come from you come from a puzzle family that's obsessed with puzzles.
Jamie Bernstein: Yes, I do. And I'm very obsessed with puzzles, and so sestinas and villanelles are a really fantastic way of forcing your brain to think about nothing else for a whole hour or two. Um, so I've been enjoying doing that. And I've also gotten completely addicted to the New York Times Spelling Bee, which they have every single day.
Michael Shapiro: Oh, yeah.
Jamie Bernstein: And my brother and sister and I are all obsessed with the Spelling Bee, and we do it first thing in the morning, and we will not quit till we get to the genius level, which means you have to sit there and make word after word after word after word. But the I have my little rituals. Rituals really help.
Michael Shapiro: Rituals are great.
Jamie Bernstein: And I'm obsessed with, uh, house cleaning because, you know, for about four months, we did not have the house cleaner coming to the house. And I'm here in our family place in Connecticut that we've had since I was a little girl. Thank God we still had it. It's been a really great place to do the great hunkering down, and I had company. I had my son and my brother and his daughter. So we were this sort of funny little nuclear family, you know, Papa Alexander and my, uh, my brother, and Mama Jamie and my son and his daughter, all sitting down and toasting each other, uh, to our good health. Dinner after dinner after dinner. But anyway, so I'm I'm the house cleaner. I have to--
Michael Shapiro: I understand. I clean toilets.
Jamie Bernstein: Uh, it's been very therapeutic to get down on my hands and knees and scrub the corners of the bathroom, I'll tell you.
Michael Shapiro: Just keep in mind that Tuscanini moves stands at Byright. So you and I I can clean a toilet and you can clean a sink. There's no question about it.
Jamie Bernstein: You bet, and I'm good at it.
Michael Shapiro: Yes, ma'am. Uh, I'm not so good at toilets. But I will talk to you about now the things we are thinking about because we are pretty much common in age, and I won't talk about how much that is because I have a lady on this interview. But--
Jamie Bernstein: No worries there.
Michael Shapiro: No worries, ma'am.
Jamie Bernstein: Yeah. And I, you know, as of COVID, no ornaments, no makeup, no vanity. It's el ser cabo.
Michael Shapiro: It's great also to shave your head when who cares. So let's talk about let's talk about let's talk about background and future. You're a mom. You were just talking about ritual. And I remember with my four children, you remember with your two, about ritual, about the babies having things at certain hours because it kept them asleep at a certain, at least we tried, at a certain time and place, and feeding at a certain hour, and reading at a certain hour, and the books at night, and so forth. All that ritual. You're a mom. You've been a wife. I've been a husband. We have these issues. We've been we're we're always parents. Okay? And God willing, grandparents someday. So, the rituals of your life, the progress of your life, nothing's there is no straight line. As we've learned with civil rights, as we've learned with human rights, Jewish life, Catholic life, whatever, there is no straight line. But when you talk about legacy and things that you impart, you not only impart to your children, because I know them. You have also imparted to the world through your writing and through your deep concern with human rights and the development of young people. Talk a little about Crescendo, talk a little about Sistema, talk a little about you and what you seek to come out of your being, which I adore. I'm just curious.
Jamie Bernstein: Okay, well, that was a very big question. So I'm going to try and break it down a little bit.
Michael Shapiro: Yes, ma'am.
Jamie Bernstein: Um, you're right that I grew up in a family that cared fiercely about social justice. And my dad started doing, getting involved in making the world a better place all the way back in his college years, and he never quit it. And he was always, you know, giving his name to any organization that was doing something good for the world, putting on benefit concerts and giving money, and and supporting whatever he could, and and getting out in the street and making a noise.
Michael Shapiro: Making good trouble. I love John Lewis's comment.
Jamie Bernstein: Boy, I love that expression.
Michael Shapiro: Yeah, good trouble.
Jamie Bernstein: His good trouble put him in the crosshairs of the FBI all the way back in the 1940s. And when he finally was able to view his FBI file in the 1980s, through the Freedom of Information Act, he discovered that it was 800 pages long. Kind of a badge of honor, really.
Michael Shapiro: But I'd like I'd like--
Jamie Bernstein: On my dad, it was like an affidavit.
Michael Shapiro: Unlike Glass and people.
Jamie Bernstein: So that's just to say that that we grew up with that understanding and our mother too was from an early age, uh, you know, she was ferbent for social justice, and and almost got kicked out of her convent school for passing out communist pamphlets.
Michael Shapiro: Good stuff.
Jamie Bernstein: So she and and, uh, her husband were a perfect fit for each other when it came to social justice. And so we all grew up with this sensibility, and we we saw from, you know, the time, uh, I was a baby, you know, my parents were obsessed watching the Army-McCarthy hearings, and then and then it was, uh, the Civil Rights Movement, and then it was protesting the Vietnam War, and then it was no nukes, and then it was, you know, speaking out for AIDS research and patient care. It was always something. So, um, it that that's how we all grew up, understanding that when you see something that isn't right, you speak up. You get out in the street, and our kids grew up that way too.
Michael Shapiro: They did.
Jamie Bernstein: And so, you know, we put on our masks, and we went into the town of Fairfield, and we joined this little march, um, for Black Lives Matter. And the greatest thing about that little march was that it had been we discovered once we got there that it had been organized by the kids in the local high school.
Michael Shapiro: Marvelous.
Jamie Bernstein: So we were marching with the high school kids, and they were the organizers. How great was that?
Michael Shapiro: You know, we have a a a saying in Yiddish, "zufil," enough. And, you know, you and I both remember the 60s. We were both I was a hippie with big hair, and anti-Vietnam, and marching, and learning all about the Civil Rights Movement, and about Jews and blacks being killed in the ditches of Mississippi, and relatives of friends being down there on the Freedom Marches. And here we go again. Nothing's it seems like nothing has changed. Although things have changed, but there's a last remnant of hatred that we must fight against to do what your family has been doing, to put the shards back together again.
Jamie Bernstein: I hope it's the last remnant.
Michael Shapiro: If it isn't, then one of our legacies, I think, has to be the kids have to continue the fight as we are continuing the fight for our parents.
Jamie Bernstein: I have to say, I feel pretty bad because when you and I were the kids, we thought we were changing the world, didn't we? We thought we were the revolutionaries, and we were stamping out racism and war forever. We were going to change everything. And now here we are handing our kids this unbelievable shit sandwich, and I'm so mortified.
Michael Shapiro: Do you think that we didn't keep it up strong enough during the 70s and 80s and 90s? Or perhaps there was a hold back? There was more fun to have free sex and drugs than to keep on pushing for the things that were important.
Jamie Bernstein: I I don't know. I will say one thing. I did get complacent when, uh, Barack Obama was elected twice. I thought, oh, how marvelous. We got there. What what a milestone. And now we're turning the corner, and instead, we were knocked backwards flat on our tuchuses in a way that we never anticipated, and I fault myself for having, uh, become too complacent and thinking, well, you know, uh, we we did our job. No, we did not. And in fact, we should have been more aware of the fact that it was all going to that that the, you know, it's like when the the tide goes way, way, way out, it means the tsunami is coming.
Michael Shapiro: That's right. And the orange killer came, and now we're fighting him.
Jamie Bernstein: With COVID.
Michael Shapiro: With COVID-19, all at the same time.
Jamie Bernstein: All at the same time. What a nightmare.
Michael Shapiro: I want to talk about legs.
Jamie Bernstein: Sorry I got so dark on you.
Michael Shapiro: No, it's go dark. We're going to go very light in a few minutes. Really blazing light. First I want to talk about legs. Legs is something which I've gotten obsessed with recently because, being a composer all my life, uh, and now recording as much as I can of my music, I've created a foundation for my music after I'm gone, because I've been thinking about that. Because I'm approaching the big 70 coming up in February, and I've been saying, oh my God, I got to do something. So I have a foundation now with my kids and Marge will run. Après moi. So hopefully there's no deluge. So let's talk about legs. In LB's case, West Side's like a freight train. You know, it's it was done also in a togetherness among remarkable men at the time. And it was also a certain kind of box. Now, I have performed West Side, and I know its power. And I know that the influence, I because I've read a lot about Jerry Robbins on him, and Sondheim on him, the other direction, and Arthur Laurents coming the opposite direction, and these creative geniuses just eking it out with Hal Robbins, you know, figuring it out on the other side. And it's like an amazing creation, and something that was deeply felt because it's, you know, it's of the streets, it's organic. I do know, though, having grown up in so-called classical music and with this society, with Aaron Copland, with Elie Siegmeister, Mark Blitzstein, all these people that your dad back in the 40s, and followed it over the years. And then I was at Columbia, and I met all of those so-called 12-tone guys, and I knew Boulez, and I knew Elliott Carter, and I knew Milton Babbitt, and I knew everybody, David Diamond, also. We'll we'll keep those stories offline. In any event, the so-called serious works of your dad, I'm not talking about Mass, which is kind of a hybrid piece, which I know you were very instrumental in getting written initially with your love of rock at the time. The symphonies and the so-called serious music of LB has been criticized repeatedly since the pieces came out. I'm not talking about the the first symphony, but certainly the second and the third. There's no question about it. And Mass to a lesser degree, although it very much was for a while, too. I'm curious how you're coming out on just the concept of legs, and whether or not it's necessary for, um, companies or foundations or entities post-composer to keep the word going. Because there are composers, wonderful ones, whose music has diminished. I've had conversations recently with well-known conductors like Leonard Slatkin and Jerry Schwarz and John Mauceri on this very point. Where is William Schuman's music? Where is Vincent Persichetti's music? Where is Piston's music? Where's Diamond's music even? Where's Siegmeister's music? Mennin, there's a lot of people that were around that period. So I'm curious if you've thought about the concept, not necessarily with with your father, but of legs. What keeps a piece or a work of art or a piece of literature going past the hawking of the living composer?
Jamie Bernstein: Again, that is a very large question, which I'm not entirely equipped to answer. But what I will say is that in my father's lifetime, you know, to be considered a so-called serious composer and to be welcomed into the halls of academe, you absolutely, positively had to write 12-tone music.
Michael Shapiro: That's right.
Jamie Bernstein: No tunes allowed, no key signature. It was very austere and very, uh, cerebral and and intellectual. And, uh, my dad was perfectly capable of writing 12-tone music and he did, often. But it was just one color on his compositional palette because he loved writing tunes. That's why he loved writing for musical theater because you there you, you know, you could the the point was to write a tune. So, in the end, uh, he would not forego writing melodies. And there's a story he told about some academic music guys coming to a rehearsal of his Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, which has some intensely 12-tone passages, and they were sitting there and there was this big sort of 12-tone fugue that the chorus is singing, and then all of a sudden, it blooms into this glorious melody, and these these guys just stood up and went and walked out. So anyway, my point is that, um, now that all these decades have gone by and we're not even in the same century or millennium, for that matter, um, it it the the straitjacket has come off, and you can composers are are free to write in any, uh, form or genre that they wish, and they will not be considered the less for it. And so, um, in the end, I think that my dad got the last laugh because many composers, I know at least three or five or six of them, look to Leonard Bernstein and other tonal composers as their inspiration, then their their mentors, and their role models.
Michael Shapiro: Well, that include that includes me.
Jamie Bernstein: Well, there you go.
Michael Shapiro: I never bought the 12-tone thing ever. Ever, ever, ever. I never bought it. I never compo--
Jamie Bernstein: And your misfortune is that you were not composing back in those days when if you had felt that way, you would not have been taken seriously. So my father knew that by every time he wrote a tune, he was kicking himself off the academic pantheon list. But he that was his choice.
Michael Shapiro: Look, Aaron Aaron Aaron went for it, though. He went 12-tone, as Schoenberg did.
Jamie Bernstein: Schoenberg did, and you know, when when Aaron Copland went 12-tone, I've looked back on it and thought to myself, it was just like when the Rolling Stones went disco.
Michael Shapiro: I love that. I want to talk about light because we've had some dark situations, but I met you first in my in Marge in my kitchen in Moab, Utah. And I'm we have Marge and I were sponsoring a party for a group that was singing that you brought with Michael Barrett into and, uh, Leslie Tomkins into the Moab Music Festival. Wonderful group. And, um, we're we're we have a little party. Michael's out on the barbecue throwing chicken and ribs all up in the air, and I'm at the bar, and suddenly I look to my right and there you are. It's a while ago. Maybe 15 years ago. And we started talking, and it was about a millisecond before we realized that we we got along really well. So, the light of Moab, which I miss my house. It's there, I can't go.
Jamie Bernstein: You still have it?
Michael Shapiro: Oh, yeah. So next time you go, you stay there. You don't have to be put up some place else. You just let me know. We still have it. We're not getting rid of it. So let me ask you a question, to end this beautiful talk. Talk to me about the light of Moab and the desert.
Jamie Bernstein: The light and the sound.
Michael Shapiro: Talk to me about.
Jamie Bernstein: So, as you probably know, one of the highlights of the Moab Music Festival, uh, is a concert that's performed in this grotto down the Colorado River, which you can only get to by boat. You have to snake down the Colorado into Canyonlands National Park, and then the jet boat deposits you on the bank, and you kind of clamber up into this perfectly formed natural ampith-- not amphitheater. Well, it's it's just shaped like a tiny opera house. And you can and what I always do is climb up on the rocks so that I'm like up in the in the box level looking down on the musicians. And the acoustics are unbelievable. It's very hard to experience utter silence in the great outdoors because you're always going to be hearing something. But in Moab, you can have the experience of these vast expanses in front of you. Miles and miles and miles of open space and utter silence. And into this utter silence, uh, a clarinet can play a gigantic note, and then that note will travel out across the Colorado River and bounce off a canyon wall 30 miles away and come yawning back at you fully five seconds later. And that that just makes the hairs on your arms stand on end. It's it's such an amazing experience.
Michael Shapiro: Well, you made my hair stand up, what hair I have stand up on its top. Jamie, thank you so much for for being with me. Uh, this has been a wonderful conversation. We can go on for hours, which we typically do, but I don't know if anybody wants to listen to us. So I thank Jamie Bernstein, my sweet friend, for being on this. Jamie Bernstein, author--
Jamie Bernstein: Thank you for inviting me.
Michael Shapiro: Writer, human rights activist, and magnificent human being. Welcome and thank you to Interplay. This is Michael Shapiro, your host.
Jamie Bernstein: It's my pleasure.
Michael Shapiro: Good to see you.
Jamie Bernstein: Nice to see you, Michael.
Michael Shapiro: Good to see you so much. You know, we have been talking about, uh, what comes around is still around. And, you know, not only with the pestilence, which is kind of like the plague of 1650 all over again, but Black Lives Matter and thinking back to the 60s, in which I know your family was very involved, even before then, in human rights. And your work, I know, with bringing song and music to young people for so many years through not only your personal work, but also Crescendo, your great movie, which is on Netflix now.
Talk to me about your feelings. I know that you are a writer, and I've read, obviously, much of your work. You're on your website, the short items, but also the recent book, which has done so well across the country, which I read in one day, Famous Father Girl. I am a groupie, of course, of what has happened, being an American composer and conductor, and the influence of LB is major. But I want to talk to you about writing because The Famous Father Girl and your writings on your website is in your voice, because I know your voice, and I've spent a lot of time with you over the years. When you sit down and write, what's the process? And where does the voice come from?
Jamie Bernstein: Well, writing and speaking are kind of one thing for me, and reading. Um, when I read a book, I'm basically reading it out loud to myself in my head, which makes me a very slow reader. And my father had the same issue too. He he could only read as fast as he could hear. And so, when it comes to my own writing, I'm hearing the writing in my head too. So the speaking and the reading and the writing and the talking, it's all one thing. So it's not a surprise that my writing voice sounds a lot like my speaking voice because they really are one and the same for better or for worse.
Michael Shapiro: I, uh, have a question for you, having to do with, um, the writing style, though. When I read Famous Father Girl and when I read your other writings, I hear your voice immediately. And it's not somebody else's voice, it's not your brother or sister's voice or Menachem Begin's voice, it's your voice. I noticed immediately. Is there an audiobook version of Famous Father Girl?
Jamie Bernstein: You betcha, and I did it. Nobody else could have done it. I would have been aghast if Harper Collins had announced to me that some other person would have been, uh, doing my audiobook because it's in my voice. So I felt completely natural, uh, doing the audiobook. It it felt completely correct, and I love when people listen to my book rather than read it, because I feel like they're getting an even more authentic experience that way.
Michael Shapiro: Well, you can't autograph my book because I I read it on Kindle. Uh, but after COVID-19, I can hug you and thank you for the book because it's amazing. Because it's it's no holds barred at all. And the reminiscences, obviously, of the famous father are good, but I find them wonderful and interesting and fascinating, and your revelations are amazing. But I love reading about your mom. Um, because I did not know her. I did not I didn't know your father slightly. Uh, but I I did never met your mother. And I have a sense that her image in you shines as bright, if not brighter, than your father. Can you speak about her?
Jamie Bernstein: Oh, well, I'm glad you got a good impression of her from my book because that means I did my job, because I was trying to I was trying to convey how rare she was, how multifarious and interesting and troubled, melancholy, witty, funny as can be. She was so many things, and her friends just adored her. And it's really hard to convey in writing the essence of a person, uh, and I was trying very hard to do this with both my parents. So if people came away from reading or listening to my book with a sense of who my parents were, then I I did my job. And the thing about my mother was that she was from Chile, you know, from South America. She raised us bilingual. She was a pianist and an actress and a fabulous painter. She was so multi-talented. And, uh, so so there was this tremendous creative spirit that she brought to all of us, but in addition to that, she really gave us the stability and the glue that kept the family together through all of the mishigas that we went through, uh, over the decades. So I really give her all the credit for making us a family that really continues to be a family. That's her legacy.
Michael Shapiro: Because you're very, very close to your brother and sister. I've seen that when I've been together with the three of you. It's a wonderful relationship that you've got. No question about it.
Jamie Bernstein: Yeah, we refer to ourselves as the three-headed monster.
Michael Shapiro: Well, you're all very different. I want to talk to you about Catholicism and Judaism. Because both run through you. Um, your mother, I think, am I right, had last rites and was a Catholic funeral?
Jamie Bernstein: She did go back to the Catholic church at the end of her life. When she and my father married, she took the vows of Rachel, as I believe they are called, and there's a ketubah and everything. Uh, so she ostensibly converted to Judaism when she got married to my dad. But in practice, it it was not quite so rigorous for either one of them. Um, they like many, uh, Jewish people in the United States, they kind of cobbled their own way of being Jewish, and, um, it was very secular, really. And when it came to holidays, you know, we did a little of this, a little of that. We had the Hanukkah candles, but we also had a Christmas tree, and we still have these rip-roaring fantastic Seders, pulling out all the stops. And then on Easter Sundays, we would have egg hunts for the kids, who are now grown up.
Michael Shapiro: You did the both. Oh, in my family as well. My my my, uh, with my first wife, Greek Orthodox, both traditions. I'm very familiar with this. But I'm curious for you as a human being and a writer, you come from a mother who was aesthetic and had these beautiful visions, I think. And a father who wanted to act like a rabbi a lot and questioned everything. So, do you find in yourself, I mean, I think about my parents all the time. I lost them fairly recently. By the way, their names were Sam and Jean. Real close to your grandparents, Sam and Jenny. I always found that to be the weirdest thing. But, do you find in yourself as you run through these the issues of life now, your reactions to things, and you're bringing up your two children, do you find that the remnants of the things you were taught, religiously first, aesthetically second, remain compelling for you? Or do you say to yourself, enough already, I'm going in this direction. Maybe I come off of where I've been, but there's more to me than just that.
Jamie Bernstein: I would say that the aesthetics came first and the religion came second in terms of importance and and stature as we were growing up. It was the music. It was the beauty of of artistic expression that that was the closest that my parents came to expressing their spiritual lives for themselves and for us as a family. And the and, you know, religious expression came second. We didn't belong to a synagogue. We didn't go regularly to shul or church. So it was really, uh, in the music that we felt the the thing that's bigger than all of us, that that sense of of spiritual connection.
Michael Shapiro: Yeah, well, the spiritual connection certainly. You know, um, Naxos has a series, the Milken Archive of of Jewish American music, which I'm a part of and your father is a part of, focusing on the so-called Jewish music that we have both created and many, many other composers. Um, you even have, you have even identified the beginning notes of West Side Story being the...
Jamie Bernstein: Shofar.
Michael Shapiro: Ta.
Jamie Bernstein: Ta-da.
Michael Shapiro:
Jamie Bernstein: Um, my dad, it those are the opening notes of the Candide overture, too. Same idea. It's a big announcement. It's it's a fanfare. Here comes the important thing.
Michael Shapiro: Tequiyah. Tequiyah. Tequiyah. And you know the names of pieces that are that way. But getting back to Jamie. As I mentioned to you, I was so taken, and read in one day, Famous Father Girl, which is a great title. Which you got to--
Jamie Bernstein: Thank you very much, classmate in second grade, Lisa, who called me that to tease me.
Michael Shapiro:
Jamie Bernstein: She didn't like me.
Michael Shapiro: But when we had dinner before the pestilence, with friends, you told me that you had ideas of different kinds of writing. And I love talking to you about expression, above everything else. And we have a lot of else to talk about with family and everything else, and friends and people we know in common, places we love like the Southwest, which we shall get to. But you said you were thinking about writing something else that was coming from a different place. And I'm curious about what that is and if you can tell us on the QT, thinking that this is going to be seen by a few thousand people, where are you going with your writing? That's what I'm curious about.
Jamie Bernstein: Well, thank you for asking. For the past year, I've been working on a new thing, and it's also personal, non-fiction. And, uh, my original concept, which I've now written 10 chapters of, virtually a whole book was already there. Um, every chapter is a a different body part. That was my original idea. And, uh, but of course there are many other things going on. But I found that when the pestilence arrived, it was really like it pulled the plug on every all my assumptions. And I'm sure that so many of us feel this way. There are so many things we took for granted. The sheer act of gathering. I never stopped to be grateful for it or to prize it or to, you know, think of it as a special gift in my life, and it's gone. Um, the sheer fact of attending a musical performance and theater, we took it for granted. We didn't, you know, treasure it. We didn't, we just assumed it would be a thing we could always do. So all all of this and more has really changed my attitude to what I was writing. Um, and I have had to go back and revisit the whole thing and put it in a new context that takes into account what we're going through now and will be going through for quite some time. The world is changed, it's different. So, uh, you know, one of the things that creative artists must always be struggling with now, not just me, is how do you sustain the the the illusion that what you're doing is important for long enough to get to the conclusion of creating it? I call this the golden blind spot, and you have to have it at all times as an artist. I mean, this preceded COVID-19. You you every artist needs to have the golden blind spot in order to sustain the illusion that what they're doing is worthy and important so that they can get through to the end of it.
Michael Shapiro: You know, the illusion, the illusion to the conclusion sounds almost like a Danny Kaye movie. I just want to remind you. But--
Jamie Bernstein: The illusion, so you can get to the conclusion. Anyway, you know, I my golden blind spot comes and goes.
Michael Shapiro: It's magnificent. It's magnificent. No, I know, I know it's part of you and that's why we always enjoy talking, and we just talk and talk and talk and talk until we can't talk anymore. But if you look at somebody like Primo Levi, who wrote those short books after the war on the Shoah, on the Holocaust, which to me are the, even above Elie Wiesel, they're the most amazing books written.
Jamie Bernstein: I agree.
Michael Shapiro: Right?
Jamie Bernstein: And look how he ended up.
Michael Shapiro: Jumped out a window.
Jamie Bernstein: I think he lost his golden blind spot for keeps.
Michael Shapiro: For keeps.
Jamie Bernstein: Anyway, it's really hard to sustain it now because, you know, the the other illusion that we live with, all of us, is that we have control over our lives, and we can make plans, and we can formulate how things are going to be in the future, and we can really fool ourselves for days, weeks at a time that we are in control of our existence. And then along comes COVID, and it strips bare, it strips away all the illusions, and we have to utterly and daily confront the fact that we are not in control of our lives at all. And I mean, we we all know that at at some level, but we're able to, you know, kind of fudge it as we go along. But there's no fudging now. We have to look it in the eye every single day.
Michael Shapiro: Yes. I hate to bring this up, but I can talk to you from personal experience. Both of us are orphans. I call us orphans because we no longer have our parents alive. Both your father and my father were both born in 1918, strangely enough. And they're gone. One thing that people talk about, uh, and there's there have been books written about it, are the various stages of grief and grieving. As you know, about rage and remembrance, and suffering, and then the long period of outrage. I still am outraged that my parents are no longer with me, even though they died at 96 and 97, which is very old. So you must have felt the same thing with your folks. But now, I'm hearing from artists, pianists I'm talking to, conductors, but especially the the performers who are saying they're not even practicing. Or they stopped. I know that the first when it first started, I they got sick with COVID pneumonia, different story. But initially, before I got sick, I wasn't writing at all. I stopped. I was just comple-- I was like, . And I only went back to it after I recovered, almost recovered from the pneumonia, from COVID pneumonia, did I get back to writing music? And now I'm writing very fiercely. And it's one of the things that got me out of the hospital when I was there, in very bad shape, was the just, I got to get back, I got to finish these pieces, I got to write my big opera, which I'll tell you about offline. I got to just do it, I got to do it, I got to do it. And it pushed, I got to see my kids, I got to see my grandsons, I got to get out of here. Talk to me about rage, remembrance, anguish, shutting down, talking about this moment you're you're seeking now to jump back into the writing.
Jamie Bernstein: Well, I it took me a long time to jump back into it. Jump is not the right verb. It was more like, like kind of sidle back over to it. And, uh, what I've been doing, and I hope it works, is I've just been rewriting the introduction to the book. My feeling being that if I can, you know, wrestle the context into something that works for me, then that will kind of set the table for me to go back and revisit all the individual chapters so that they all line up with this new, uh, context. So we'll we'll see if that works. Um, it's slow going but at least I'm working on something, so that's good news. I've also written quite a lot of poetry, actually.
Michael Shapiro: You've always been a poet, you've been a lyricist and a poet.
Jamie Bernstein: Yep, I've always been a poet, but I never used to write sestinas and villanelles.
Michael Shapiro: Wow.
Jamie Bernstein: And, you know, they're like puzzles. They have all these rules and regulations about the the rhyme scheme and the repeating words, and there are all these sort of special rules and regulations. Um, and they always remind me of that expression, those wise restraints that make us free.
Michael Shapiro: I love it. But you come from you come from a puzzle family that's obsessed with puzzles.
Jamie Bernstein: Yes, I do. And I'm very obsessed with puzzles, and so sestinas and villanelles are a really fantastic way of forcing your brain to think about nothing else for a whole hour or two. Um, so I've been enjoying doing that. And I've also gotten completely addicted to the New York Times Spelling Bee, which they have every single day.
Michael Shapiro: Oh, yeah.
Jamie Bernstein: And my brother and sister and I are all obsessed with the Spelling Bee, and we do it first thing in the morning, and we will not quit till we get to the genius level, which means you have to sit there and make word after word after word after word. But the I have my little rituals. Rituals really help.
Michael Shapiro: Rituals are great.
Jamie Bernstein: And I'm obsessed with, uh, house cleaning because, you know, for about four months, we did not have the house cleaner coming to the house. And I'm here in our family place in Connecticut that we've had since I was a little girl. Thank God we still had it. It's been a really great place to do the great hunkering down, and I had company. I had my son and my brother and his daughter. So we were this sort of funny little nuclear family, you know, Papa Alexander and my, uh, my brother, and Mama Jamie and my son and his daughter, all sitting down and toasting each other, uh, to our good health. Dinner after dinner after dinner. But anyway, so I'm I'm the house cleaner. I have to--
Michael Shapiro: I understand. I clean toilets.
Jamie Bernstein: Uh, it's been very therapeutic to get down on my hands and knees and scrub the corners of the bathroom, I'll tell you.
Michael Shapiro: Just keep in mind that Tuscanini moves stands at Byright. So you and I I can clean a toilet and you can clean a sink. There's no question about it.
Jamie Bernstein: You bet, and I'm good at it.
Michael Shapiro: Yes, ma'am. Uh, I'm not so good at toilets. But I will talk to you about now the things we are thinking about because we are pretty much common in age, and I won't talk about how much that is because I have a lady on this interview. But--
Jamie Bernstein: No worries there.
Michael Shapiro: No worries, ma'am.
Jamie Bernstein: Yeah. And I, you know, as of COVID, no ornaments, no makeup, no vanity. It's el ser cabo.
Michael Shapiro: It's great also to shave your head when who cares. So let's talk about let's talk about let's talk about background and future. You're a mom. You were just talking about ritual. And I remember with my four children, you remember with your two, about ritual, about the babies having things at certain hours because it kept them asleep at a certain, at least we tried, at a certain time and place, and feeding at a certain hour, and reading at a certain hour, and the books at night, and so forth. All that ritual. You're a mom. You've been a wife. I've been a husband. We have these issues. We've been we're we're always parents. Okay? And God willing, grandparents someday. So, the rituals of your life, the progress of your life, nothing's there is no straight line. As we've learned with civil rights, as we've learned with human rights, Jewish life, Catholic life, whatever, there is no straight line. But when you talk about legacy and things that you impart, you not only impart to your children, because I know them. You have also imparted to the world through your writing and through your deep concern with human rights and the development of young people. Talk a little about Crescendo, talk a little about Sistema, talk a little about you and what you seek to come out of your being, which I adore. I'm just curious.
Jamie Bernstein: Okay, well, that was a very big question. So I'm going to try and break it down a little bit.
Michael Shapiro: Yes, ma'am.
Jamie Bernstein: Um, you're right that I grew up in a family that cared fiercely about social justice. And my dad started doing, getting involved in making the world a better place all the way back in his college years, and he never quit it. And he was always, you know, giving his name to any organization that was doing something good for the world, putting on benefit concerts and giving money, and and supporting whatever he could, and and getting out in the street and making a noise.
Michael Shapiro: Making good trouble. I love John Lewis's comment.
Jamie Bernstein: Boy, I love that expression.
Michael Shapiro: Yeah, good trouble.
Jamie Bernstein: His good trouble put him in the crosshairs of the FBI all the way back in the 1940s. And when he finally was able to view his FBI file in the 1980s, through the Freedom of Information Act, he discovered that it was 800 pages long. Kind of a badge of honor, really.
Michael Shapiro: But I'd like I'd like--
Jamie Bernstein: On my dad, it was like an affidavit.
Michael Shapiro: Unlike Glass and people.
Jamie Bernstein: So that's just to say that that we grew up with that understanding and our mother too was from an early age, uh, you know, she was ferbent for social justice, and and almost got kicked out of her convent school for passing out communist pamphlets.
Michael Shapiro: Good stuff.
Jamie Bernstein: So she and and, uh, her husband were a perfect fit for each other when it came to social justice. And so we all grew up with this sensibility, and we we saw from, you know, the time, uh, I was a baby, you know, my parents were obsessed watching the Army-McCarthy hearings, and then and then it was, uh, the Civil Rights Movement, and then it was protesting the Vietnam War, and then it was no nukes, and then it was, you know, speaking out for AIDS research and patient care. It was always something. So, um, it that that's how we all grew up, understanding that when you see something that isn't right, you speak up. You get out in the street, and our kids grew up that way too.
Michael Shapiro: They did.
Jamie Bernstein: And so, you know, we put on our masks, and we went into the town of Fairfield, and we joined this little march, um, for Black Lives Matter. And the greatest thing about that little march was that it had been we discovered once we got there that it had been organized by the kids in the local high school.
Michael Shapiro: Marvelous.
Jamie Bernstein: So we were marching with the high school kids, and they were the organizers. How great was that?
Michael Shapiro: You know, we have a a a saying in Yiddish, "zufil," enough. And, you know, you and I both remember the 60s. We were both I was a hippie with big hair, and anti-Vietnam, and marching, and learning all about the Civil Rights Movement, and about Jews and blacks being killed in the ditches of Mississippi, and relatives of friends being down there on the Freedom Marches. And here we go again. Nothing's it seems like nothing has changed. Although things have changed, but there's a last remnant of hatred that we must fight against to do what your family has been doing, to put the shards back together again.
Jamie Bernstein: I hope it's the last remnant.
Michael Shapiro: If it isn't, then one of our legacies, I think, has to be the kids have to continue the fight as we are continuing the fight for our parents.
Jamie Bernstein: I have to say, I feel pretty bad because when you and I were the kids, we thought we were changing the world, didn't we? We thought we were the revolutionaries, and we were stamping out racism and war forever. We were going to change everything. And now here we are handing our kids this unbelievable shit sandwich, and I'm so mortified.
Michael Shapiro: Do you think that we didn't keep it up strong enough during the 70s and 80s and 90s? Or perhaps there was a hold back? There was more fun to have free sex and drugs than to keep on pushing for the things that were important.
Jamie Bernstein: I I don't know. I will say one thing. I did get complacent when, uh, Barack Obama was elected twice. I thought, oh, how marvelous. We got there. What what a milestone. And now we're turning the corner, and instead, we were knocked backwards flat on our tuchuses in a way that we never anticipated, and I fault myself for having, uh, become too complacent and thinking, well, you know, uh, we we did our job. No, we did not. And in fact, we should have been more aware of the fact that it was all going to that that the, you know, it's like when the the tide goes way, way, way out, it means the tsunami is coming.
Michael Shapiro: That's right. And the orange killer came, and now we're fighting him.
Jamie Bernstein: With COVID.
Michael Shapiro: With COVID-19, all at the same time.
Jamie Bernstein: All at the same time. What a nightmare.
Michael Shapiro: I want to talk about legs.
Jamie Bernstein: Sorry I got so dark on you.
Michael Shapiro: No, it's go dark. We're going to go very light in a few minutes. Really blazing light. First I want to talk about legs. Legs is something which I've gotten obsessed with recently because, being a composer all my life, uh, and now recording as much as I can of my music, I've created a foundation for my music after I'm gone, because I've been thinking about that. Because I'm approaching the big 70 coming up in February, and I've been saying, oh my God, I got to do something. So I have a foundation now with my kids and Marge will run. Après moi. So hopefully there's no deluge. So let's talk about legs. In LB's case, West Side's like a freight train. You know, it's it was done also in a togetherness among remarkable men at the time. And it was also a certain kind of box. Now, I have performed West Side, and I know its power. And I know that the influence, I because I've read a lot about Jerry Robbins on him, and Sondheim on him, the other direction, and Arthur Laurents coming the opposite direction, and these creative geniuses just eking it out with Hal Robbins, you know, figuring it out on the other side. And it's like an amazing creation, and something that was deeply felt because it's, you know, it's of the streets, it's organic. I do know, though, having grown up in so-called classical music and with this society, with Aaron Copland, with Elie Siegmeister, Mark Blitzstein, all these people that your dad back in the 40s, and followed it over the years. And then I was at Columbia, and I met all of those so-called 12-tone guys, and I knew Boulez, and I knew Elliott Carter, and I knew Milton Babbitt, and I knew everybody, David Diamond, also. We'll we'll keep those stories offline. In any event, the so-called serious works of your dad, I'm not talking about Mass, which is kind of a hybrid piece, which I know you were very instrumental in getting written initially with your love of rock at the time. The symphonies and the so-called serious music of LB has been criticized repeatedly since the pieces came out. I'm not talking about the the first symphony, but certainly the second and the third. There's no question about it. And Mass to a lesser degree, although it very much was for a while, too. I'm curious how you're coming out on just the concept of legs, and whether or not it's necessary for, um, companies or foundations or entities post-composer to keep the word going. Because there are composers, wonderful ones, whose music has diminished. I've had conversations recently with well-known conductors like Leonard Slatkin and Jerry Schwarz and John Mauceri on this very point. Where is William Schuman's music? Where is Vincent Persichetti's music? Where is Piston's music? Where's Diamond's music even? Where's Siegmeister's music? Mennin, there's a lot of people that were around that period. So I'm curious if you've thought about the concept, not necessarily with with your father, but of legs. What keeps a piece or a work of art or a piece of literature going past the hawking of the living composer?
Jamie Bernstein: Again, that is a very large question, which I'm not entirely equipped to answer. But what I will say is that in my father's lifetime, you know, to be considered a so-called serious composer and to be welcomed into the halls of academe, you absolutely, positively had to write 12-tone music.
Michael Shapiro: That's right.
Jamie Bernstein: No tunes allowed, no key signature. It was very austere and very, uh, cerebral and and intellectual. And, uh, my dad was perfectly capable of writing 12-tone music and he did, often. But it was just one color on his compositional palette because he loved writing tunes. That's why he loved writing for musical theater because you there you, you know, you could the the point was to write a tune. So, in the end, uh, he would not forego writing melodies. And there's a story he told about some academic music guys coming to a rehearsal of his Symphony No. 3, Kaddish, which has some intensely 12-tone passages, and they were sitting there and there was this big sort of 12-tone fugue that the chorus is singing, and then all of a sudden, it blooms into this glorious melody, and these these guys just stood up and went and walked out. So anyway, my point is that, um, now that all these decades have gone by and we're not even in the same century or millennium, for that matter, um, it it the the straitjacket has come off, and you can composers are are free to write in any, uh, form or genre that they wish, and they will not be considered the less for it. And so, um, in the end, I think that my dad got the last laugh because many composers, I know at least three or five or six of them, look to Leonard Bernstein and other tonal composers as their inspiration, then their their mentors, and their role models.
Michael Shapiro: Well, that include that includes me.
Jamie Bernstein: Well, there you go.
Michael Shapiro: I never bought the 12-tone thing ever. Ever, ever, ever. I never bought it. I never compo--
Jamie Bernstein: And your misfortune is that you were not composing back in those days when if you had felt that way, you would not have been taken seriously. So my father knew that by every time he wrote a tune, he was kicking himself off the academic pantheon list. But he that was his choice.
Michael Shapiro: Look, Aaron Aaron Aaron went for it, though. He went 12-tone, as Schoenberg did.
Jamie Bernstein: Schoenberg did, and you know, when when Aaron Copland went 12-tone, I've looked back on it and thought to myself, it was just like when the Rolling Stones went disco.
Michael Shapiro: I love that. I want to talk about light because we've had some dark situations, but I met you first in my in Marge in my kitchen in Moab, Utah. And I'm we have Marge and I were sponsoring a party for a group that was singing that you brought with Michael Barrett into and, uh, Leslie Tomkins into the Moab Music Festival. Wonderful group. And, um, we're we're we have a little party. Michael's out on the barbecue throwing chicken and ribs all up in the air, and I'm at the bar, and suddenly I look to my right and there you are. It's a while ago. Maybe 15 years ago. And we started talking, and it was about a millisecond before we realized that we we got along really well. So, the light of Moab, which I miss my house. It's there, I can't go.
Jamie Bernstein: You still have it?
Michael Shapiro: Oh, yeah. So next time you go, you stay there. You don't have to be put up some place else. You just let me know. We still have it. We're not getting rid of it. So let me ask you a question, to end this beautiful talk. Talk to me about the light of Moab and the desert.
Jamie Bernstein: The light and the sound.
Michael Shapiro: Talk to me about.
Jamie Bernstein: So, as you probably know, one of the highlights of the Moab Music Festival, uh, is a concert that's performed in this grotto down the Colorado River, which you can only get to by boat. You have to snake down the Colorado into Canyonlands National Park, and then the jet boat deposits you on the bank, and you kind of clamber up into this perfectly formed natural ampith-- not amphitheater. Well, it's it's just shaped like a tiny opera house. And you can and what I always do is climb up on the rocks so that I'm like up in the in the box level looking down on the musicians. And the acoustics are unbelievable. It's very hard to experience utter silence in the great outdoors because you're always going to be hearing something. But in Moab, you can have the experience of these vast expanses in front of you. Miles and miles and miles of open space and utter silence. And into this utter silence, uh, a clarinet can play a gigantic note, and then that note will travel out across the Colorado River and bounce off a canyon wall 30 miles away and come yawning back at you fully five seconds later. And that that just makes the hairs on your arms stand on end. It's it's such an amazing experience.
Michael Shapiro: Well, you made my hair stand up, what hair I have stand up on its top. Jamie, thank you so much for for being with me. Uh, this has been a wonderful conversation. We can go on for hours, which we typically do, but I don't know if anybody wants to listen to us. So I thank Jamie Bernstein, my sweet friend, for being on this. Jamie Bernstein, author--
Jamie Bernstein: Thank you for inviting me.
Michael Shapiro: Writer, human rights activist, and magnificent human being. Welcome and thank you to Interplay. This is Michael Shapiro, your host.
