By CAROL J. OJA AND RYAN RAUL BAÑAGALE

Leonard Bernstein's 1944 musical On the Town succinctly summarized what all New Yorkers know about their city: "It's a helluva town." Bernstein certainly had many reasons to feel that. Within two years of moving to New York, he completed his First Symphony ("Jeremiah"), signed his first contract with a music publisher (Harms-Witmark), premiered Aaron Copland's new Piano Sonata, wrote a hit Broadway musical (On the Town), and became assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic (which resulted in his famous debut with the orchestra in 1943, when he filled in for an ailing Bruno Walter at Carnegie Hall, winning him instant acclaim). As a performer, conductor, and composer, Bernstein quickly became a dazzling force on the New York scene. But where did this young man come from?

Bernstein composing Hashkivenu in 1945. (Photo by Eric Kasten)

Leonard Bernstein, Boston to Broadway, a major international festival taking place from October 12-14 at Harvard University, plans to address that very question. Directed by Juilliard's director of choral activities, Judith Clurman, together with Carol J. Oja of Harvard, this three-day event, cosponsored by Harvard's Office for the Arts and Department of Music, will focus on Bernstein's work as a composer and his historic ties to a variety of musical and educational communities in greater Boston. The festival will unfold on multiple levels through panel discussions, master classes, exhibitions, video screenings, and performances. (For complete details, log onto www.bernsteinatharvard.org.)

As Harvard's Bernstein project has gained steam, it has grown far beyond original expectations. "What is amazing is that we were originally going to do only one concert," Clurman notes. "I suggested another one showing Bernstein's musical roots and expanding the festival from two to three days. There was too much music and too many fine scholars to compress everything into two days."

Judith Clurman rehearsing Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony with the Juilliard Choral Union in October 2003. Clurman is a co-director of Leonard Bernstein, Boston to Broadway, a three-day festival at Harvard University. (Photo by Peter Schaaf)

Fundamental to the Bernstein project has been the involvement of Harvard students—both graduates and undergraduates—in research and performance. For the festival, students are serving as curators for an exhibit, presenting research papers about intriguing themes in Bernstein's youth, contributing to the program book, and performing in two different concerts.

Born in 1918, Leonard Bernstein was raised in the greater Boston area in the historically Jewish neighborhoods of Roxbury and Newton. He attended Boston Latin High School and later Harvard University. Taking his first steps as a musician, Bernstein played piano recitals, directed amateur musical productions, and composed for a variety of ensembles. He was intensely involved with his family synagogue, Congregation Mishkan Tefila, which during Bernstein's childhood was located in Roxbury. (It has since moved to Chestnut Hill.)

In preparation for the festival, Oja and her Harvard colleague Kay Kaufman Shelemay team-taught a seminar last spring titled "Before West Side Story: Leonard Bernstein's Boston." The goal was not conventional biography. Others have already done that, most notably Humphrey Burton in his Leonard Bernstein (Doubleday, 1994). Rather, Oja and Shelemay imagined a new kind of life study—one which situates an international celebrity like Bernstein amidst the interlinking local ethnic, religious, educational, and musical communities that defined his youth—and they planned for this student inquiry to kick-start the planning process for the festival. Students fused archival and ethnographic research, conducting interviews as a class and also dividing into research teams that explored such topics as Bernstein's elementary-school education in Roxbury; his adolescent theater productions; his formative contact with orchestras and conductors, whether Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra or Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops; his Harvard stage productions; his involvement at Brandeis University during its early years; and his family's ties to Mishkan Tefila. The students conducted an extraordinary number of interviews, locating many of Bernstein's surviving childhood acquaintances in an effort to preserve memories that would otherwise be lost. All the materials gathered have been deposited in Harvard's Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library.

The conductor leading the Vienna Philharmonic in Athens, 1977. (Photo coutesy of the Leonard Bernstein Office)

Myriad intriguing research threads emerged in the process. While doing research for a seminar in the Library of Congress's Bernstein Collection, Ryan Bañagale was fortunate enough to discover an unknown arrangement by Bernstein of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. It is downright whimsical—scored for accordion, ukulele, and voice, among other instruments—and was written in response to Gershwin's death in the summer of 1937, when the 17-year-old Bernstein was working as a counselor at a summer camp in the Berkshires. Bañagale has edited a performing edition of this arrangement, which will receive its concert premiere at the festival.

There are many intriguing parallels between the careers of Bernstein and Gershwin. Both were remarkable pianists from an early age, and both eventually composed for Broadway and the concert hall. Recent investigations into Bernstein's youth revealed an early and fervent attraction to Gershwin's music. Bernstein purchased Gershwin's scores, staged his musicals with friends, and even attended the original pre-Broadway production of Porgy and Bess in Boston. Throughout all of this, he had a particularly strong affection for Rhapsody in Blue.

This newly discovered arrangement of the piece provides an important link between Bernstein's first encounter at age 13 with sheet music for Rhapsody in Blue, his performances of the piece at 20 with the WPA State Symphony Orchestra in Boston, and the degree to which the work became central to his life as a mature performer.

Bernstein's daugher, Jamie. "I always got the feeling that he was tickled to revisit the people and places of his past," she recalls, "and equally delighted to leave it a day or two later for the life he'd created elsewhere." (Photo by Peter Schaaf)

Another set of enticing questions surrounds Bernstein's experience as a radio listener during the 1930s. Carol Oja's path to the festival emerged while writing Bernstein and Broadway, a book to be published by Yale University Press. After joining the Harvard faculty in 2003, she began wondering about Bernstein within the context of local history. How might his life-mission of fusing opera and musical theater—of blurring the dividing line between music of high status and that considered as popular or commercial—have been grounded in his family's frequent sessions in front of the radio?

A flick of the dial in urban America during the 1930s could turn up the likes of Lily Pons and Walter Damrosch on the one hand, or Rudy Vallee and Vincent Lopez on the other. Bernstein's radio days pop up repeatedly in his mature work. For example, when he wrote Wonderful Town with lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green in late 1952 and early 1953, he sought musical signifiers to conjure up the show's setting in the 1930s. All three later recalled that Bernstein did so by referencing the piano style of radio star Eddie Duchin. Another interesting case is the vocal trio at the opening of Bernstein's opera Trouble in Tahiti, written just before Wonderful Town. He described it in one manuscript as "a Greek Chorus born of the radio commercial," and that's exactly what its crooning harmonies and scat syllables evoke. (This manuscript, like that for Bernstein's arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue, is now housed in the voluminous Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress.)

It appears that Bernstein, the future television personality, learned much from his exposure to early radio's populist mission—bringing the erudite world of classical music into homes across the country.

Leonard Bernstein contucting an orchestral master class at Juilliard on March 13, 1979. (Photo by Peter Schaaf)

Bernstein's abilities as composer, performer, and conductor eventually made him one of the most acclaimed musical celebrities of the 20th century. Throughout it all, however, he was mindful of his past, periodically popping in on his home town. "Like so many others who leave home for broader horizons, my father had mixed feelings about returning to his roots," recalls his daughter Jamie Bernstein. "But when in Boston, his ambivalence ultimately took a back seat to his irrepressible enthusiasm for people. My father loved seeing his old friends and multifarious relatives. His status as an international musical celebrity never gave him airs or diminished his curiosity and affection. He enjoyed driving down the old streets, visiting his old synagogue, even eating the foods of his youth (which were not always of the highest nutritional value). As a child and later an adult observing him in his native milieu, I always got the feeling that he was tickled to revisit the people and places of his past—and equally delighted to leave it a day or two later for the life he'd created elsewhere."

And so Harvard's Bernstein Festival will focus on his local ties within the context of his international celebrity. As Tip O'Neill, near-contemporary of Bernstein and longtime speaker of the House of Representatives (not to mention fellow son of Massachusetts), famously quipped, "All politics is local." While Bernstein's multifaceted musical career eventually expanded far beyond his home state, much remains to be gained by sifting through its very fertile local soil, searching for the cultural and religious roots that forged his social values and personal identity.

Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and author of Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (Oxford). Ryan Bañagale is a graduate student in historical musicology at Harvard.