Featured Work
Songfest (1977)
Originally commissioned to be a work in celebration of the American Bicentennial Year, Songfest draws a comprehensive picture of America's artistic past, as seen in 1976 through the eyes of a contemporary artist. The composer has envisioned this picture through the words of 13 poets embracing 300 years of the country's history. The subject matter of their poetry is the American artist's experience as it relates to his or her creativity, loves, marriages, or minority problems (blacks, women, homosexuals, expatriates) within a fundamentally Puritan society.
The Leonard Bernstein Office Mission
The Leonard Bernstein Office (LBO) sustains and strengthens Leonard Bernstein’s legacy by inspiring global engagement with his work as a composer, conductor, educator, and humanitarian. Through licensing, promotion, music editing, and publishing, the LBO strives to communicate his lifelong devotion to the transformative power and joy of music.
Submit your memories to the Leonard Bernstein Memory Project and help us keep his legacy alive.
Thus Spake Leonard Bernstein:
"If you have this compulsion to be an artist and you do have talent and you are a functioning artist, then you owe it to yourself not to do anything self-destructive. You not only owe it to yourself, you owe it to the society of which you are a part."
Leonard Bernstein
Interview with Boston Latin School Register, June 1967