Bestseller Revisited

THE JOY OF Music (303 pp.) -- Leonard Bernstein -- Simon & Schuster ($5.95).

On television several years ago, twelve musicians in dinner jackets solemnly walked across the first page (enlarged) of the score of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and began tootling the opening bars of the music they were standing on. The stunt was conceived and conducted by Leonard Bernstein, music's most gifted showman. The proceedings of that TV program and of several others are collected in a bestselling book in which Conductor Bernstein proves himself as handy a man with a pen as he is with a baton.

In writing his scripts, Bernstein explains, he tried to avoid the tortuous absurdities of practitioners of the "Music Appreciation Racket" who tangle themselves and their readers in niggling explanations of "the-theme-upside-down-in-the-second-oboe." The result is a book that is fresh, witty and informative. Bernstein meanders through discussions of the conductor's art, the dubbing of movie scores, the grandeur of grand opera, the Americanness of American musical comedy, the prejudice against modern music, and half a dozen other topics -- all tending to disprove Bernstein's own thesis that "the only way one can really say anything about music is to write music." To Bernstein, the flute included by Beethoven in an early version of the Fifth Symphony's opening is like "a delicate lady at a club smoker"; The Black Crook, an early musicomedy, is held together with "spit and chewing gum"; tonality is analogous to a baseball diamond (with home plate as the tonic note); the opening of the third act of La Boheme is a series of "cold, empty fifths, raining like snowflakes over the stage."

To illustrate what is meant by recitative, Bernstein provides a snatch of opera in the style of Mozart: "Susanna, I have something terrible to tell you/I've just been talking to the butcher/And he tells me/That the price of chicken has gone up three cents a pound!" For Italian-opera lovers he repeats the sequence in Verdian style ("Gilda! II prezzo di polio"), and for unabashed German romantics a snatch of Wagner ("Ach, was ward mir heut' angetan!").

The Joy of Music has nothing new to say, but it says the familiar with zest and wit. Only a Leonard Bernstein, for instance, would ever undertake to explain jazz by writing a Macbeth Blues:

I will not be afraid of death or bane I said I will not be afraid of death or bane Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.

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