Watching TV with
Galileo
 Besides the Teen Titans
on Saturday morning and the occasional episode of Zoom, my five-year-old son,
Galileo, doesn’t watch TV. This relative lack of television viewing has left him
ready to watch anything I’m willing to let him watch, so I had a captive audience
when I got the first of a nine-disc set of Leonard Bernstein and the New York
Philharmonic’s Concerts for Young People from Netflix. This wasn’t the
first time Galileo and I have enjoyed Bernstein & Co.: we’ve had the three-LP set
of a children’s introduction to the orchestra since he was born (my wife has owned
the set since childhood; like her, it’s still in great shape), and last year Galileo
was often in the room while I listened to Leonard Bernstein: An American Life, an
NPR documentary series about Bernstein. (The documentary, which I found highly enjoyable,
is available as an 11-CD set from www.zbs.org.)
When I suggested we watch one of these concerts, my son told me he wanted to watch some of
the Fleisher Superman cartoons or some Looney Tunes that we recently got on
DVD, so we struck a deal: one children’s concert, then some cartoons.
The first episode of Bernstein’s Concerts for Young
People, "What Music Means," originally aired on CBS in 1958. The first thing
you’ll notice is that television production has come a long way. The show is black
and white, of course, the print is pretty cruddy and soft, and, in order to get more of
the orchestra in the picture, they used a fisheye lens that creates a distractingly
odd-looking image. All of the children are in jackets and ties or dresses, and the
television director has no compunction about showing some children falling asleep during
the show. The sound and video are mediocre.
But the show is fantastic. Bernstein’s message
throughout his lecture and performance is that, literally, music does not mean anything
other than the sounds that it is composed of and the related emotional reactions we have.
The least important part of the music’s meaning is any story that the composer or
listener might overlay on the sound. Music can be used to tell stories, or can be given
specific titles to invoke places or things, but the music as music does not
necessarily relate to those places or things. Each of our individual responses to a piece
of music is as good as anyone else’s. This is a sophisticated message for young
children, but, using an example that involves Superman, Bernstein makes his points clearly
and persuasively.
We watched this hour-long show intently for about 30
minutes, after which Galileo went upstairs. I thought the show might have bored him, but
in fact he’d left only to return to our home theater with two tambourines, a
recorder, an accordion, and a triangle so that we could play along with the orchestra.
I’m sure Richard Strauss never wrote an accordion part for Don Quixote, but
Galileo’s improvisation sure sounded good. So good, in fact, that we forgot about the
cartoons altogether and just kept playing music. We even watched the second concert on the
disc, which features American music. Geek that I am, I was excited when, near the end of
the concert, Bernstein announces a special guest, Aaron Copland, who concludes the show by
conducting some of his own music.
As Galileo and I accompanied the New York Philharmonic on
recorder and accordion, I began to think that, no matter how informative and captivating
Bernstein’s shows are, they would never again have a large audience. My son’s
friends expect their TV shows to have color, fast movement, and marketing ties to
inexplicable card games. They’d never sit still for a black-and-white concert and
lecture -- I’m not even sure some of their parents could sit still for these shows.
I’d love to see a new series of children’s concerts broadcast on over-the-air
television with a conductor and orchestra who would revisit these same themes and
introduce young kids to music.
I’m sure that many orchestras around the country host
children’s concerts, but that isn’t the same as the wide audience they could get
on television. A quick check of local orchestras showed that Wynton Marsalis will host a
children’s concert with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra soon, but the tickets are
$30 each. So, while the children of music lovers or the well-heeled will enjoy the show,
most kids in need of exposure to music will not be helped.
Television is, I think, the only way to bring
"serious" music -- by which I mean not American Idol and its offspring --
to a mass audience. Leonard Bernstein was no ordinary conductor; any successful new series
would need to find another charismatic figure who could really speak to children. If done
right, it could be just as successful as Idol and its imitators, but I doubt that
even PBS would nowadays undertake such a series.
This week my son was home sick, and I found myself watching
Zoom with him. We don’t watch it regularly, but in this episode they used LPs
in a science experiment involving static electricity. One of the Zoom kids said
something like, "These are records. If you’ve never seen one, ask your parents
about them. They might remember them from before CDs. You probably have some in your
basement or you can find them at yard sales." This Zoom project didn’t
destroy the records the way other craft projects do (such as making a bowl by softening a
record in the oven), but it illustrated how LPs continue to get little respect and are
treated as an obsolete technology. This month we review an entry-level turntable package
from Thorens that could ensure that your kids won’t have to wonder what records are
for. One thing the kids on Zoom had right is that records are cheap; anyone without
a turntable is missing out on a great deal of inexpensive music that can sound as good as,
and often better than, those newfangled CDs . . . or SACDs . . . or DVDs.
…Eric D. Hetherington
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