Lennie's Kindergarten

"Here comes Superman! ... He hears the whistle . . . Listen to that snoring . . . There's the kazoo . . . Bop! ... He grabs his friend . . . and they're off!"

This, to hear Conductor Leonard Bernstein tell it, is what might be happening at a climactic moment during Richard Strauss's Don Quixote. Bernstein bawled this analysis from the podium at one of his current New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts. His point: music does not need verbal meanings assigned to it, and Don Quixote could as well be about Superman as about the "silly old man" on a "skinny, bony old horse."

This comic-strip exercise in esthetics is typical of the way Bernstein this season made the old Young People's series a bracing, fact-filled musical kindergarten for young and old. He wrote his own scripts for four televised, hour-long concerts (the last is due next month), using much the same technique as in the Omnibus music-appreciation series (TIME, Feb. 4, 1957). Teacher Bernstein combined, in equal parts, his musical knowledge, charm, eloquence and ham.

Takata. For last week's program on "What Does Orchestration Mean?" Bernstein arrived at Carnegie Hall at 5:45 a.m. with his finished script to rehearse until the performance started at noon. During the concert, bouncy, boyish-looking Lecturer Bernstein roamed the stage with a microphone stuck in his jacket, sometimes sat down at the piano to dash off a musical example. Only occasionally did he indulge in cuteness, as when he spoke of "Grandfather Bassoon" and "Little Sister Piccolo," or explained that orchestration is like "putting clothes on notes."

He had his audience "orchestrate" with him--buzz to simulate loud strings, sing "tick, tick, tick" for a woodwind sound and "takata" for the brasses. "Oo," he commented, "seemed to me sort of bluish. When we sang 'takata' it seemed like a fiery orange." With a flick of the wrist in midsentence, he would bring in the 107-man New York Philharmonic to illustrate his points, rapidly skipping from Mozart to Stravinsky to Hindemith. The finale: a rousing performance of Ravel's Bolero, part of which he compared to "very high class hootchy-kootchy music."

Say Please. His null audience, says Bernstein, is far more mature than he expected. "They come to the music fresh, without any of the prejudices older people have." Bernstein's favorite among his listeners is the small boy who watched open-mouthed as the conductor chanted "I want it, I want it, I want it," in imitation of a phrase in Tchaikovsky. Finally, the boy turned to his mother and said in a brassy voice: "If he wants it that bad, why doesn't he say 'please'?"

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