Featured Work
Songfest (1977)
Originally commissioned to be a work in celebration of the American Bicentennial Year (1976), Songfest was commissioned to draw a comprehensive picture of America's artistic past, as seen in 1976 through the eyes of a contemporary artist.
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:
"The one quality that characterizes all the teaching I have done, public teaching, or quality I have tried for is always to be talking above the music and showing the music, and to get as far away as possible from what is usually called ‘music appreciation,’ which is the birds-and-bees department, and vague generalizations which are made about the music."
-Leonard Bernstein (Life Magazine, October 24, 1958)