It's Not Anybody's Nose That's the Problem
Thoughts on Institutional Racism and the Upcoming Leonard Bernstein Biopic
I don’t care about the prosthetic nose that Bradley Cooper wore to play Leonard Bernstein in the upcoming biopic of the Broadway songwriter and classical conductor and composer, though I don’t fault other people for being bothered by it. I’m not a fan of biopics in general – they tend to portray their subjects simplistically, and I’ve never seen one where the actor comes close to capturing the human specificity and uniqueness of the subject, their charisma, or the brilliance for that which made them a subject worthy of a multi-million-dollar entertainment investment.
My indifference to the genre aside, though, I worry that a Bernstein biopic will ignore his racism.
Because it’s almost never discussed.
Was he a bigoted jerk? Not that I’ve ever heard or read. Was he a racist? He supported the Civil Rights movement and other humane and humanistic causes, but in some of his discourse about music, he spoke in racist ways.
Leonard Bernstein was a star of the musical tradition that we call “classical” – our shorthand term for European court and church musical traditions and their lineages. For a time he was its most famous spokesperson, and he saw himself as an ambassador between classical and various vernacular traditions. It’s in those roles that he promoted the idea that music from the European court and church traditions is serious and other music is not. And that’s a racist idea, regardless of Bernstein’s intention.
I got interested in this question because of an exchange that Bernstein had with Louis Armstrong after they performed a “Concerto Grosso” arrangement of “St. Louis Blues” for symphony orchestra and jazz sextet in concert. In the middle of a brief and otherwise flattering speech, Bernstein described Armstrong’s approach as “simple.”
My hackles, they are raised. Even though Armstrong responded like a master trickster, and in such a subtle and disarming way that Bernstein didn’t notice. I’m writing a book about the exchange and the issues it raises.
In early drafts, I didn’t consider Bernstein’s motivations, thinking that maybe his condescension was unconscious. But I recently read something that confirmed that his characterization of Armstrong’s musicianship as “simple” wasn’t a slip of the tongue. He meant it and he believed it.
Bernstein and Armstrong’s collaboration and dialog took place in 1956. In 1959, Bernstein broadcast an educational television program, which he wrote and narrated, titled, “Jazz in Serious Music,” the script for which he printed in a book in 1966. You see the problem immediately. Jazz . . . is not serious music?
Bernstein digs into how the rhythms of ragtime attracted European composers as early as the nineteen-aughts. He describes “Maple Leaf Rag” as “pure, naïve, high spirits.” In the next paragraph he speaks of the “complexity” that the “sophisticated European composer” Erik Satie brought to bear when he used ragtime rhythms in his ballet, Parade. In the next two paragraphs, Igor Stravinsky makes even more “sophisticated” and “complicated” use of ragtime, which means, “we are now entering the domain of what is called ‘serious music.’ Not just a fox trot here, a bunny hug there; this was meant to be first-class music, several cuts above the level of sheer entertainment.” In the next paragraph he extols the “durability” of Darius Milhaud’s jazz-influenced balled The Creation of the World, claiming (in 1959 and again in 1966) “that even today it sounds as fresh as it did when it was written in 1923.”
I like The Creation of the World – it’s a cool piece. The opening passages, before the jazz influence kicks in, remind me of things by Charles Ives, a fave. I’m a classical fan. But Milhaud’s piece sounds way more dated than anything by Scott Joplin – a great composer whose most famous work up till that time (“Maple Leaf Rag”) Bernstein had just discussed without even having had the courtesy to mention Scott Joplin’s name.
As it happens, someone attempted to fuse ragtime with the European tradition before the Europeans. Someone named Scott Joplin. In his opera, Treemonisha. Which he couldn't get produced. Because he was Black. Even though a music journal reviewed the piano score (!!!) and gave it an excellent review. In 1911. (It was Joplin’s second opera.)
And -- the kicker: When Treemonisha finally got produced 60 years later, Joplin’s orchestrations had been lost. Thrown away by his heirs. As worthless, of no interest to anybody. Which happened in 1962. Three years after Bernstein complimented a piece of Joplin’s on TV as a delightful, naïve bauble of so little significance that its composer’s name was not even worth mentioning.
Chilling.
People knew of the existence of Treemonisha in 1959. Ragtime scholar Rudi Blesh had a copy of the piano score and had written, with his co-author Harriet Janis, about the beauty of the music in a book they published in 1950, They All Played Ragtime. It’s too bad that Bernstein didn’t know this.
Why do I think that The Creation of the World sounds dated? In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald invented a fictional Russian composer who, at Jay Gatsby’s party, debuted a fictional composition, titled, “A Jazz History of the World” – a parody of Milhaud’s title that made me chuckle when I first read the book in my 20s and that now strikes me as callow. When Jay-Z’s production of the film of The Great Gatsby came out in 2013, I was curious to see it, in part because I wondered – what were they going to do for that music? They can’t possibly use the Milhaud, I remember thinking, it’s far too rhythmically stiff and awkward for today’s ears. And my jaw dropped when the party scene came and George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue blared out of the speakers, matching the swirling glamor of director Baz Luhrmann’s visual conception perfectly. Gershwin’s rhythms haven’t dated nearly as much as Milhaud’s.
Neither have Joplin’s.
“Durability” varies over time.
As it happens, Bernstein devoted the rest of his televised lecture to analyses of The Creation of the World and Rhapsody in Blue. From his Eurocentric viewpoint, his analyses are cogent. He was a terrific musician.
Who spoke for his tradition in racist ways.
Bernstein’s condescension toward vernacular practices has survived in classical performances of his own music. Earlier this year I went to hear the Seattle Symphony play a program of music responding to William Shakespeare’s tragedy, Romeo and Juliet – music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Leonard Bernstein, whose concert suite, Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, was presented. And during the Bernstein selection, when the conductor and many members of the orchestra snapped their fingers in accordance with the score, the guest conductor, Marin Alsop, exaggerated her arm motion, playing the moment for laughs, and the audience laughed. While I agree that some timbres can be funny – a farting sound, maybe, or a duck quacking in the middle of a piece of music – it hadn’t occurred to me that anybody would find finger snapping funny. But it’s a vernacular timbre, unusual in a classical context, and therefore to be mocked, I guess. I mentioned it to a New Yorker musician friend and fellow Bernstein fan; he’d seen the piece performed too and said that it’s apparently standard practice to choreograph the finger snapping comedically. Blecchh.
Now, I don’t mean to say that classical music is racist. It’s music. I love it; I grew up with it; it was my first musical love and I never stopped loving it. But the tradition that promotes classical as the music most worthy of public subsidy is an instance of institutional racism, a useful notion that describes racist effects in the absence of bigoted motivation. The racist impact of institutional racism is independent of the motives of the people behind the decisions, which don’t matter. The racist messaging of the reality, where classical music dominates public subsidies, exists regardless of the intentions of the musicians, which are usually (though not in Bernstein’s case) blameless. I got no problem with classical music fans saying, “Classical music gasses me, man,” or, “It rocks me,” or, “It’s the ginchiest!” But the three publicly-subsidized concert halls in downtown Seattle, counting the ballet, devoted to the lineages of European court and church music – they give the message, “These are the traditions that are worthy of subsidy, and no other musical traditions deserve such temples.” And that’s a horrible message. It supports a culture of white domination.
Likewise with a biopic devoted to an excellent Broadway songwriter, charismatic conductor, and occasionally performed classical composer who repeatedly spoke condescendingly about Black musical traditions. I’ve read lovable Bernstein anecdotes. I love a lot of his songs. I’ve enjoyed some of his classical pieces. But I’d rather see movies (if we’re going to be stuck with biopics) about African American musicians: Bessie Smith, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, James P. Johnson, Lonnie Johnson, Professor Longhair, Don Redman, Sylvia Robinson, Duke Ellington, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, or, you know, Louis Armstrong, to name a few, were all far more influential than Bernstein on subsequent musical practices. Not even close. When Hollywood does choose to portray great Black musicians, they tend to choose stories about people with serious personal problems and often tragic endings.
Which is gross.
The racism inherent in our choices – of what musical practices our universities teach, of what buildings our public and private funding agencies pay for, of what biopics get made – it goes deep. It doesn’t mean that Bradley Cooper’s wanting to make a movie about Leonard Bernstein rather than Sylvia Robinson is a racist choice. The nature of these institutional racisms is such that the intentions of the people making the decisions don’t matter. Whose stories does our culture value? Whose stories will movie producers fund? The cumulative impact – the overarching message – of these decisions is what people mean by institutional racism. I have no reason to suspect Bradley Cooper of racism, and the nature of these films is such that the negative impacts of a tiny percentage of Bernstein’s discourse almost certainly won’t be discussed. But his negative impact is part of his legacy too.
If you see the Bernstein pic, let me know what you think. If they include the story of how he met his friend Adolph Green (an adorable anecdote), I might go see it. If they dig into the racism of his discourse about Black music, I’ll definitely see it. I’m not optimistic.
Images at top:
1. Book cover of King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, by Edward A. Berlin, the source of the story of how and when the orchestral parts for Joplin’s opera Treemonisha got discarded.
2. The record cover of Satchmo the Great, with a photo of Louis Armstrong playing trumpet; it’s the source of the dialog between Armstrong and Bernstein.
3. The text and image from the cover of the book The Infinite Variety of Music, with a photo of Leonard Bernstein (a glamorous, charismatic man whose nose size I’d never thought about before) in a tuxedo, head tilted back, and waving a conductor’s baton; he published his tele-script for “Jazz in Serious Music” in this book.
4. Book cover of They All Played Ragtime: The True Story of an American Music, by Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. Later editions omitted the subtitle from the cover.
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Further thoughts:
If you hadn’t heard about the nose controversy, it’s easy enough to find discussions. Bernstein’s children support Cooper’s choice to enhance his nose. Others are troubled by the historic association of antisemitism and focusing on Jewish noses.
This isn’t the place to go deep into Treemonisha, but if you haven’t heard it, it’s great, and two numbers stand out to me.
“We’re Going Around” sounds like it could be from the 1943 musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Oklahoma! It sounds like a 1940s Broadway version of country music. And it sounds great. You can hear and see it from a 1975 Houston production here.
The finale, “A Real Slow Drag,” is gorgeous, optimistic, and thrilling in its gradual build. Marching onward — check it out. Had Joplin succeeded in producing the opera, it would have changed American musical history.
Treemonisha wasn’t Joplin’s first opera. He succeeded in mounting a tour, with a 30-member company, of his 1903 “ragtime opera,” A Guest of Honor, about Booker T. Washington’s visit to Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. Somebody stole all the cash on hand of Scott Joplin’s Ragtime Opera Company (the name of his group) while they were on tour in the Midwest — they are known to have been in Kansas and Illinois — and creditors seized Joplin’s assets, including the score. He didn’t have a copy and apparently never attempted to recreate or retrieve it; he didn’t look back. The story would make a heck of a movie, but the absence of the music feels like a possible barrier.