Picking up the thread three days later, the main highlight of the second session was Carol Oja of the College of William and Mary, who did a dynamic and interesting presentation on Bernstein's "Trouble in Tahiti". It reminded me of how well I still know this work, even after only hearing it a couple of times in my whole life. Oja's piece used printed exemplars, audio segments, video clips, went straight to the point and lasted exactly thirty minutes. It was the best presentation of the whole conference - Oja is a real pro at this sort of thing, and she hasn't lost sight of the fact that a presentation needs to be interesting and entertaining.
Unfortunately Oja was sandwiched in between two other speakers, both non-musicologists invited to share their interests in Bernstein under the general concept of "criss cross", which was in part addressed to bringing in the particpation of scholars from other disciplines. First we heard from Natalie Hibbs, a mannish twentysomething who is a gay/lesbian activist at U of M and also the lead singer from a local band. She gave a presentation on "Bernstien's Mass Appeal". I don't have the program handy, but the subtitle included something about "dirty laundry", and that was mostly what it was about, I'm afraid. A portrait of Leonard Bernstein, American queer. It was well-written and generally well delivered, although when the clock chimed eight (the bell tower was rigt outside the window) she stopped reading and made everyone wait until it was done chiming - inconsiderate, and very bad form for someone giving a formal paper. Also it was too long by about eight minutes - she might've shaved two points off of it had she continued reading as the bell chimed.
Secondly, Hibbs made two points that I didn't follow too well - (1) she persisted in referring to Bernstein as a "homosexual" but also referred to his "omniverousness", which would imply bi-sexuality, as his biographers have uniformly had it so far. (2) Hibbs related a story that put Bernstein in a position of undercutting Dmitri Mitropoulous at the New York Philharmonic, asserting his sham status as a hetero to convince the NYP that he was a better choice to lead the orchestra than the closet homo Mitropoulous. If true, this would be an egregious and unforgivable sin, the act of sabotaging the career of the person who got you your start. As it is such a serious accusation, I would demand that she qualify where this information came from, which even she admits "(Bernstein's) bigraphers leave out." I have a feeling they left it out because it isn't true, or can't be proven, and presenting the story as truth in a formal setting without qualification is unacceptable.
But not nearly as unacceptable as the novelist who did the talk entitled "The Man I Love: Leonard Bernstein, Philip Roth, Artie Shaw and the Future of the Jewish Pervert." I am not going to repeat his name, as if he had any sense in his head he would do his best to distance himself as far as possible from having delivered this wholly unnecessary, intellectually vacuous and idiotic talk. He started off about how he was writing his 2,000th novel, which he said as though it was nothing that in itself should strain credibility - if he has written 2,000 novels than all of them has been as long as my one novel ("EYR's Bad Novel" (1981) a Dadaist literary work a half-page in length) or someone else is writing them for him. This was a ridiculous story about a powerful Jewish pervert who is a university professor that gets fired. He is further humilated when he romances a janitor who is perceived as beneath his class, but he marries her. They both are killed in a car accident, and at his funeral it is revealed that he was an african-american "passing" as a Jew. After about ten minutes of this I was about ready to jump out of the nearest window, and it went on for another agonizing 27 minutes. Untimately he lost his way, and weakly offered as a conclusion the old adage "Jewishness complicates everything." You got that right, pal!
After he played the Artie Shaw version of "The Man I Love", both the writer and his rhethoric cooled down. In the waning minutes of this long, disconnected discourse, I figured out this fellow was someone who was deeply sensitive to music and it probably does help inspire him in his work. A conversation with him over lunch might not be a bad diversion, but a paper given in the context of a symposium on music was sheer agony. I still don't know what his talk had to do with his subject, nor with the conference. He made a fool out of himself, and wasted my time.
Uncle Dave Lewis