The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University is a renowned conservatory and preparatory school located in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Charles and Monument Streets at Mount Vernon Place.

History

Founded in 1857 by philanthropist George Peabody, it is the second-oldest continuously operating conservatory in the United States, next to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Completion of the Grecian-Italian building housing the Institute, designed by Edmund George Lind, was delayed until 1866 due to the Civil War. Under the direction of well-known musicians, composers, conductors, and Peabody alumni, the Institute grew from a local academy into an internationally-renowned cultural center through the late 19th and the 20th centuries.

Since 1977, the institute has operated as a division of the Johns Hopkins University, consistently ranked as one of America's top universities. Because of this affiliation, Peabody students are exposed to a liberal arts curriculum that is notably more extensive than those typically available in other leading conservatories; similarly, Hopkins students have access to a world-class musical education and experience that they might not have access to at another university of such stature.

Peabody is one of 156 schools in the U.S. that offer a Doctorate of Musical Arts Degree. It houses two important libraries: the historical George Peabody Library established when the institute opened in 1866, and the Arthur Friedheim Library, a music library includes more than 100,000 books, scores, and sound recordings.

Peabody Children's Chorus

The Peabody Children's chorus is for children ages 6–18. It is divided into three groups: Training Choir, Choristers, and Chamber Singers, grouped by age in ascending order. They practice weekly in Towson or Columbia, Maryland, and sing in concerts biannually, under the instruction of Doreen Falby, Bradley Permenter, and Ruriko Osawa. The Chamber Singers, ages 12–18, frequently perform with other groups, such as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, The Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, The Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, and the Baltimore Choral Arts Society.

Notable attendees

Tori Amos — American-born pianist who has sold over 12 million records.

Dominick Argento — A leading composer of lyric opera and choral music.

Carter Brey - Principal cellist, New York Philharmonic.

Richard Cassilly — Leading interpreter of Wagnerian Tenor repertoire

Angelin Chang — Grammy-award winning classical pianist

Martha Clarke — (Prep.) Choreographer and dance director.

Richard Wayne Dirksen — Graduated ''magna cum laude'' in June 1942, later organist-choirmaster at the Washington National Cathedral

Virgil Fox — Concert organist and recording artist.

Philip Glass — (Prep.) Composer of opera and contemporary music.

Hilary Hahn - (Prep.) Violinist.

Michael Hedges - Composer, Grammy Award-winning (1998) guitarist.

Michael Hersch — American composer.

Kevin Kenner — American-born pianist, winner of top prize in International Chopin Competition, bronze in International Tchaikovsky Competition.

Custer LaRue - American soprano, specialist in music of the Renaissance and vocal solist of the Baltimore Consort

Ellis Larkins — First African-American to attend the conservatory.

James Morris — Wagnerian baritone, Grammy winner and Metropolitan Opera star.

Tommy Newsom — Saxophonist for ''The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson''

Awadagin Pratt — Concert pianist, violinist and conductor, winner of Walter W. Naumburg Foundation Competition.

Lillian Smith (1897–1966) — Author and social critic (two enrollments, no degree)

David Spelman – Founder and Artistic Director of New York Guitar Festival, music supervisor in the film industry.

John Charles Thomas - Opera and concert baritone and member of the Metropolitan Opera company in the 1930s and '40s.

André Watts — Concert pianist, Grammy winner and professor at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music.

Paul Wells, concert pianist

Hugh Wolff - Conductor, currently on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music.

Charles A. Zimmerman (1861–1916) - Bandmaster at US Naval Academy 1887 to 1916, composer of ''Anchors Aweigh''.

Mem Nahadr — (Prep.) African American Performance Artist, pianist and singer-songwriter. Attended from age ten to fourteen.

Notable faculty

Victor Danchenko, violin

Diran Alexanian, cello

Marin Alsop, conducting

Manuel Barrueco, guitar

Joe Burgstaller, trumpet

Garnett Bruce, opera

Jay Clayton, jazz

David Fedderly, tuba

Leon Fleisher, piano

Violaine Melancon, violin

Pamela Frank, violin

Richard Franco Goldman, (1910–1980), Director

Asger Hamerik, Director 1871-1898

Michael Hersch, composition

Ingrid Jensen, jazz/trumpet

Nicholas Maw (1935–2009), composition

Anthony McGill, clarinet

Gustav Meier, conducting

Teri Hajime Murai, Conducting

Edward Palanker, clarinet

Marina Piccinini, flute

John Shirley-Quirk, voice

Robert van Sice, percussion

Laurie Sokoloff, piccolo/flute

Barry Tuckwell, horn

Frank Valentino, voice

John Walker, organ

Phyllis Bryn-Julson, voice

See also

Music school

Music schools in the United States

References

External links

Official site

Category:Johns Hopkins University Category:Universities and colleges in Baltimore, Maryland Category:Music schools in Maryland Category:Educational institutions established in 1857

es:Instituto Peabody ko:피바디 음악원 it:Peabody Institute (Baltimora) nl:Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University pl:Peabody Institute ru:Консерватория Пибоди

African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, and formerly as American Negroes) are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa. Most African Americans are of West and Central African descent and are descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States. However, some immigrants from African, Caribbean, Central American or South American nations, or their descendants, may be identified or self-identify with the term.

African Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States.

African-American history starts in the 16th century with African slaves who quickly rose up against the Spanish explorer Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón and progresses to the present day, with Barack Obama as the 44th and current President of the United States. Between those landmarks there have been events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, including slavery, racism, reconstruction, development of the African-American community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement.

History

Slavery era

The first African slaves arrived in the present-day United States as part of the San Miguel de Gualdape colony (most likely located in the Winyah Bay area of present-day South Carolina), founded by Spanish explorer Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón in 1526. The ill-fated colony was almost immediately disrupted by a fight over leadership, during which the slaves revolted and fled the colony to seek refuge among local Native Americans. De Ayllón and many of the colonists died shortly afterwards of an epidemic and the colony was abandoned, leaving the escaped slaves behind on North American soil.

In 1565, the colony of Saint Augustine in Florida, founded by Pedro Menendez de Aviles, became the first permanent European settlement in North America. It included an unknown number of free and enslaved Africans that were part of this colonial expedition.

The first recorded Africans in British North America (including most of the future United States) arrived in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia. As English settlers died from harsh conditions, more and more Africans were brought to work as laborers. The Africans were likely treated as indentured servants, similar in legal position to poor English indenturees, who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America. Africans could legally raise crops and cattle to purchase their freedom. They raised families, marrying other Africans and sometimes intermarrying with Native Americans or English settlers. By the 1640s and 1650s, several African families owned farms around Jamestown and some became wealthy by colonial standards.

The popular conception of a race-based slave system did not fully develop until the 18th century. The Dutch West India Company introduced slavery in 1625 with the importation of eleven black slaves into New Amsterdam (present-day New York City). All the colony's slaves, however, were freed upon its surrender to the British. Massachusetts was the first British colony to legally recognize slavery in 1641. It was not until 1662 that Virginia ruled that a slave mother's children would remain slaves.

The first black congregations and churches were organized before 1800 in both northern and southern cities following the Great Awakening. By 1775, Africans made up 20% of the population in the American colonies, which made them the second largest ethnic group after the English. During the 1770s, Africans, both enslaved and free, helped rebellious English colonists secure American Independence by defeating the British in the American Revolution. Africans and Englishmen fought side by side and were fully integrated. James Armistead, an African American, played a large part in making possible the 1781 Yorktown victory, which established the United States as an independent nation. Other prominent African Americans were Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell, who are both depicted in the front of the boat in George Washington's famous ''1776 Crossing the Delaware'' portrait.

By 1860, there were 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the United States due to the Atlantic slave trade, and another 500,000 African Americans lived free across the country. In 1863, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared that all slaves in states which had seceded from the Union were free. Advancing Union troops enforced the proclamation with Texas being the last state to be emancipated in 1865.

Reconstruction and Jim Crow

[[File:Jesse Owens1.jpg|thumb|right|Jesse Owens shook racial stereotypes both with Nazis and segregationists in the USA at the 1936 Berlin olympics.]] African Americans quickly set up congregations for themselves, as well as schools, community and civic associations, to have space away from white control or oversight. While the post-war reconstruction era was initially a time of progress for African Americans, in the late 1890s, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws to enforce racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Most African Americans followed the Jim Crow laws, using a mask of compliance to prevent becoming victims of racially motivated violence. To maintain self-esteem and dignity, African Americans such as Anthony Overton and Mary McLeod Bethune continued to build their own schools, churches, banks, social clubs, and other businesses.

In the last decade of the 19th century, racially discriminatory laws and racial violence aimed at African Americans began to mushroom in the United States. These discriminatory acts included racial segregation—upheld by the United States Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896—which was legally mandated by southern states and nationwide at the local level of government, voter suppression or disenfranchisement in the southern states, denial of economic opportunity or resources nationwide, and private acts of violence and mass racial violence aimed at African Americans unhindered or encouraged by government authorities.

Great Migration and Civil Rights Movement

The desperate conditions of African Americans in the South that sparked the Great Migration of the early 20th century, combined with a growing African American community in the Northern United States, led to a movement to fight violence and discrimination against African Americans that, like abolitionism before it, crossed racial lines. The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 was directed at abolishing racial discrimination against African Americans, particularly in the Southern United States. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the conditions which brought it into being are credited with putting pressure on President John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Johnson put his support behind passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions, and the Voting Rights Act (1965), which expanded federal authority over states to ensure black political participation through protection of voter registration and elections. By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1966 to 1975, expanded upon the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from white authority.

Post-Civil Rights era

Politically and economically, blacks have made substantial strides during the post-civil rights era. In 1989, Douglas Wilder became the first African-American elected governor in U.S. history. There is currently one black governor; governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. Clarence Thomas became the second African-American Supreme Court Justice. In 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois became the first black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. There were 8,936 black officeholders in the United States in 2000, showing a net increase of 7,467 since 1970. In 2001 there were 484 black mayors.

On November 4, 2008, Democratic Senator Barack Obama defeated Republican Senator John McCain to become the first African American to be elected President. At least 95 percent of African-American voters voted for Obama. He also received overwhelming support from young and educated whites, a majority of Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans picking up a number of new states in the Democratic electoral column. Obama lost the overall white vote, although he won a larger proportion of white votes than any previous nonincumbent Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. The following year Michael S. Steele was elected the first African-American chairman of the national Republican Party.

Demographics

In 1790, when the first U.S. Census was taken, Africans (including slaves and free people) numbered about 760,000—about 19.3% of the population. In 1860, at the start of the Civil War, the African American population had increased to 4.4 million, but the percentage rate dropped to 14% of the overall population of the country. The vast majority were slaves, with only 488,000 counted as "freemen". By 1900, the black population had doubled and reached 8.8 million. In 1910, about 90% of African Americans lived in the South, but large numbers began migrating north looking for better job opportunities and living conditions, and to escape Jim Crow laws and racial violence. The Great Migration, as it was called, spanned the 1890s to the 1970s. From 1916 through the 1960s, more than 6 million black people moved north. But in the 1970s and 1980s, that trend reversed, with more African Americans moving south to the Sun Belt than leaving it.

The following table of the African American population in the United States over time shows that the African American population, as a percentage of the total population, declined until 1930 and has been rising since then. {|class="wikitable" style="float:left; font-size:85%;" African Americans in the United States ! Year || Number || % of totalpopulation || % Change(10 yr) || Slaves || % in slavery |- | 1790 || 757,208 || 19.3% (highest) || – || 697,681 || 92% |- | 1800 || 1,002,037 || 18.9% || 32.3% || 893,602 || 89% |- | 1810 || 1,377,808 || 19.0% || 37.5% || 1,191,362 || 86% |- | 1820 || 1,771,656 || 18.4% || 28.6% || 1,538,022 || 87% |- | 1830 || 2,328,642 || 18.1% || 31.4% || 2,009,043 || 86% |- | 1840 || 2,873,648 || 16.8% || 23.4% || 2,487,355 || 87% |- | 1850 || 3,638,808 || 15.7% || 26.6% || 3,204,287 || 88% |- | 1860 || 4,441,830 || 14.1% || 22.1% || 3,953,731 || 89% |- | 1870 || 4,880,009 || 12.7% || 9.9% || – || – |- | 1880 || 6,580,793 || 13.1% || 34.9% || – || – |- | 1890 || 7,488,788 || 11.9% || 13.8% || – || – |- | 1900 || 8,833,994 || 11.6% || 18.0% || – || – |- | 1910 || 9,827,763 || 10.7% || 11.2% || – || – |- | 1920 || 10.5 million || 9.9% || 6.8% || – || – |- | 1930 || 11.9 million || 9.7% (lowest) || 13% || – || – |- | 1940 || 12.9 million || 9.8% || 8.4% || – || – |- | 1950 || 15.0 million || 10.0% || 16% || – || – |- | 1960 || 18.9 million || 10.5% || 26% || – || – |- | 1970 || 22.6 million || 11.1% || 20% || – || – |- | 1980 || 26.5 million || 11.7% || 17% || – || – |- | 1990 || 30.0 million || 12.1% || 13% || – || – |- | 2000 || 34.6 million || 12.3% || 15% || – || – |- | 2010 || 38.9 million || 12.6% || 12% || – || – |- |}

By 1990, the African American population reached about 30 million and represented 12% of the U.S. population, roughly the same proportion as in 1900. In current demographics, according to 2005 U.S. Census figures, some 39.9 million African Americans live in the United States, comprising 13.8% of the total population. The World Factbook gives a 2006 figure of 12.9% Controversy has surrounded the "accurate" population count of African Americans for decades. The NAACP believed it was under counted intentionally to minimize the significance of the black population in order to reduce their political power base.

At the time of the 2000 Census, 54.8% of African Americans lived in the South. In that year, 17.6% of African Americans lived in the Northeast and 18.7% in the Midwest, while only 8.9% lived in the western states. The west does have a sizable black population in certain areas, however. California, the nation's most populous state, has the fifth largest African American population, only behind New York, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. According to the 2000 Census, approximately 2.05% of African Americans identified as Hispanic or Latino in origin, many of whom may be of Brazilian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, Haitian, or other Latin American descent. The only self-reported ''ancestral'' groups larger than African Americans are the Irish and Germans. Because many African Americans trace their ancestry to colonial American origins, some simply self-identify as "American".

U.S. cities

Almost 58% of African Americans lived in metropolitan areas in 2000. With over 2 million black residents, New York City had the largest black urban population in the United States in 2000, overall the city has a 28% black population. Chicago has the second largest black population, with almost 1.6 million African Americans in its metropolitan area, representing about 18 percent of the total metropolitan population.

Among cities of 100,000 or more, Detroit, Michigan had the highest percentage of black residents of any U.S. city in 2010, with 82%. Other large cities with African American majorities include New Orleans, Louisiana (60%), Baltimore, Maryland (63%) Atlanta, Georgia (54%), Memphis, Tennessee (61%), and Washington, D.C. (50.7%).

The nation's most affluent county with an African American majority is Prince George's County, Maryland, with a median income of $62,467. Within that county, among the wealthiest communities are Glenn Dale, Maryland and Fort Washington, Maryland. Other affluent predominantly African American counties include Dekalb County in Georgia, and Charles City County in Virginia. Queens County, New York is the only county with a population of 65,000 or more where African Americans have a higher median household income than White Americans.

Religion

The majority of African Americans are Protestant of whom many follow the historically black churches. Black church refers to churches which minister predominantly African American congregations. Black congregations were first established by freed slaves at the end of the 17th century, and later when slavery was abolished more African Americans were allowed to create a unique form of Christianity that was culturally influenced by African spiritual traditions.

According to a 2007 survey, more than half of the African American population are part of the historically black churches. The largest Protestant denomination among African Americans are the Baptists, distributed in four denominations, the largest being the National Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention of America. The second largest are the Methodists, the largest sects are the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Pentecostals are mainly part of the Church of God in Christ. About 16% of African American Christians are members of white Protestant communions, these denominations (which include the United Church of Christ) mostly have a 2 to 3% African American membership. There are also large numbers of Roman Catholics, constituting 5% of the African American population. Of the total number of Jehovah's Witnesses, 22% are black.

Some African Americans follow Islam. Historically, between 15 to 30% of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas were Muslims, but most of these Africans were converted to Christianity during the era of American slavery. However during the 20th century, some African Americans converted to Islam, mainly through the influence of black nationalist groups that preached with distinctive Islamic practices; these include the Moorish Science Temple of America, though the largest organization was the Nation of Islam, founded during the 1930s, which attracted at least 20,000 people as of 1963, prominent members included activist Malcolm X and boxer Muhammad Ali.

Malcolm X is considered the first person to start the movement among African Americans towards mainstream Islam, after he left the Nation and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In 1975, Warith Deen Mohammed, the son of Elijah Muhammad who took control of the Nation after his death, guided majority of its members to orthodox Islam. However, few members rejected these changes, in particular Louis Farrakhan, who revived the Nation of Islam in 1978 based on its original teachings.

African American Muslims constitute 20% of the total U.S. Muslim population, the majority are Sunni or orthodox Muslims, some of these identify under the community of W. Deen Mohammed. The Nation of Islam led by Louis Farrakhan has a membership from 20,000—50,000 members.

There are relatively few African American Jews; estimates of their number range from 20,000 to 200,000. Most of these Jews are part of mainstream groups such as the Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox branches of Judaism; although there are significant numbers of people who are part of non-mainstream Jewish groups, largely the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose beliefs include the claim that African Americans are descended from the Biblical Israelites.

Contemporary issues

African Americans have improved their social and economic standing significantly since the Civil Rights Movement and recent decades have witnessed the expansion of a robust, African American middle class across the United States. Unprecedented access to higher education and employment in addition to representation in the highest levels of American government has been gained by African Americans in the post-civil rights era.

Nevertheless, due in part to the legacy of slavery, racism and discrimination, African Americans as a group remain at a pronounced economic, educational and social disadvantage in many areas relative to European Americans. Persistent social, economic and political issues for many African Americans include inadequate health care access and delivery; institutional racism and discrimination in housing, education, policing, criminal justice and employment; crime, poverty and substance abuse.

One of the most serious and long standing issues within African American communities is poverty. Poverty itself is a hardship as it is related to marital stress and dissolution, health problems, low educational attainment, deficits in psychological functioning, and crime. In 2004, 24.7% of African American families lived below the poverty level. In 2007, the average African American income was $33,916, compared with $54,920 for whites.

Politics and social issues

Collectively, African Americans are more involved in the American political process than other minority groups in the United States, indicated by the highest level of voter registration and participation in elections among these groups in 2004. African Americans collectively attain higher levels of education than immigrants to the United States. African Americans also have the highest level of Congressional representation of any minority group in the U.S.

The large majority of African Americans support the Democratic Party. In the 2004 Presidential Election, Democrat John Kerry received 88% of the African American vote compared to 11% for Republican George W. Bush. Although there is an African-American lobby in foreign policy, it has not had the impact that African American organizations have had in domestic policy.

Historically, African Americans were supporters of the Republican Party because it was Republican President Abraham Lincoln who helped in granting freedom to American slaves; at the time, the Republicans and Democrats represented the sectional interests of the North and South, respectively, rather than any specific ideology, and both right and left were represented equally in both parties.

The African American trend of voting for Democrats can be traced back to the 1930s during the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program provided economic relief to African Americans; Roosevelt's New Deal coalition turned the Democratic Party into an organization of the working class and their liberal allies, regardless of region. The African American vote became even more solidly Democratic when Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson pushed for civil rights legislation during the 1960s.

After over 50 years, marriage rates for ''all'' Americans began to decline while divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births have climbed. These changes have been greatest among African Americans. After more than 70 years of racial parity black marriage rates began to fall behind whites. Single-parent households have become common, and according to US census figures released in January 2010, only 38 percent of black children live with both their parents. Despite that and heavy Democratic leanings, African Americans favor "traditional American values" about family and marriage.

While 52% of Democrats support same-sex marriage, only 30% of black Democrats do. In 2008, though Democrats overwhelmingly voted (64%) against the California ballot proposition banning gay marriage, blacks overwhelmingly approved (70% in favor) it, more than any other racial group. The high-profile candidacy of Barack Obama is credited with increasing black turnout on the bill which has been seen as the crucial difference in its passing.

Blacks also hold far more conservative opinions on abortion, extramarital sex, and raising children out of wedlock than Democrats as a whole. On financial issues, however, African Americans are very much in line with Democrats, generally supporting a more progressive tax structure to provide more services and reduce injustice and as well as more government spending on social services.

News media and coverage

Some activists and academics contend that news media coverage of African American news concerns or dilemmas is inadequate or the news media present distorted images of African Americans. To combat this, Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television, a network that targets young African Americans and urban audiences in the United States. Most programming on the network consists of rap and R&B; music videos and urban-oriented movies and series. The channel also shows syndicated television series, original programs, and some public affairs programs. On Sunday mornings, BET broadcasts a lineup of network-produced Christian programming; other, non-affiliated Christian programs are also shown during the early morning hours daily. BET is now a global network that reaches 85 million viewers in the Caribbean, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

In addition to BET there is Centric, which is a spin-off cable television channel of BET, created originally as ''BET on Jazz'' to showcase jazz music-related programming, especially that of black jazz musicians. Programming has been expanded to include a block of urban programs as well as some R&B;, neo soul, and alternative hip hop, with the focus on jazz reduced to low-profile hours.

TV One is another African American-oriented network and a direct competitor to BET, targeting African American adults with a broad range of programming. The network airs original lifestyle and entertainment-oriented shows, movies, fashion and music programming, as well as classic series such as 227, Good Times, Martin, Boston Public and It's Showtime at the Apollo. The network primarily owned by Radio One. Founded and controlled by Catherine Hughes, it is one of the nation's largest radio broadcasting companies and the largest African American-owned radio broadcasting company in the United States.

Other African American networks scheduled to launch in 2009 are the Black Television News Channel founded by former Congressman J. C. Watts and Better Black Television founded by Percy Miller. In June 2009, NBC News launched a new website named The Grio in partnership with the production team that created the black documentary film, Meeting David Wilson. It is the first African American video news site which focuses on underrepresented stories in existing national news. The Grio consists of a broad spectrum of original video packages, news articles, and contributor blogs on topics including breaking news, politics, health, business, entertainment and Black History.

Education

By 2000, African Americans had advanced greatly. They still lagged overall in education attainment compared to white or Asian Americans, with 14 percent with four year and 5 percent with advanced degrees, though it was higher than for other minorities. African Americans attend college at about half the rate of whites, but at a greater rate than Americans of Hispanic origin. More African American women attend and complete college than men. Black schools for kindergarten through twelfth grade students were common throughout the U.S., and a pattern towards re-segregation is currently occurring across the country.

Historically black colleges and universities remain today which were originally set up when segregated colleges did not admit African Americans. As late as 1947, about one third of African Americans over 65 were considered to lack the literacy to read and write their own names. By 1969, illiteracy as it had been traditionally defined, had been largely eradicated among younger African Americans.

US Census surveys showed that by 1998, 89 percent of African Americans aged 25 to 29 had completed high school, less than whites or Asians, but more than Hispanics. On many college entrance, standardized tests and grades, African Americans have historically lagged behind whites, but some studies suggest that the achievement gap has been closing. Many policy makers have proposed that this gap can and will be eliminated through policies such as affirmative action, desegregation, and multiculturalism.

In Chicago, Marva Collins, an African American educator, created a low cost private school specifically for the purpose of teaching low-income African American children whom the public school system had labeled as being "learning disabled". One article about Marva Collins' school stated,

Working with students having the worst of backgrounds, those who were working far below grade level, and even those who had been labeled as 'unteachable,' Marva was able to overcome the obstacles. News of third grade students reading at ninth grade level, four-year-olds learning to read in only a few months, outstanding test scores, disappearance of behavioral problems, second-graders studying Shakespeare, and other incredible reports, astounded the public.

During the 2006–2007 school year, Collins' school charged $5,500 for tuition, and parents said that the school did a much better job than the Chicago public school system. Meanwhile, during the 2007–2008 year, Chicago public school officials claimed that their budget of $11,300 per student was not enough.

Economic status

Economically, African Americans have benefited from the advances made during the Civil Rights era, particularly among the educated, but not without the lingering effects of historical marginalization when considered as a whole. The racial disparity in poverty rates has narrowed. The black middle class has grown substantially. In 2000, 47% of African Americans owned their homes. The poverty rate among African Americans has decreased from 26.5% in 1998 to 24.7% in 2004. African Americans are the second largest consumer group in America with a combined buying power of over $892 billion currently and likely over $1.1 trillion by 2012. In 2002 African American-owned businesses accounted for 1.2 million of the US's 23 million businesses. As of 2011 African American-owned business account for approximately 2 million US businesses. Black-owned businesses experienced the largest growth in number of businesses among minorities from 2002 to 2011.

In 2004, African American workers had the second-highest median earnings of American minority groups after Asian Americans, and African Americans had the highest level of male-female income parity of all ethnic groups in the United States. Also, among American minority groups, only Asian Americans were more likely to hold white-collar occupations (management, professional, and related fields), and African Americans were no more or less likely than European Americans to work in the service industry. In 2001, over half of African American households of married couples earned $50,000 or more. Although in the same year African Americans were over-represented among the nation's poor, this was directly related to the disproportionate percentage of African American families headed by single women; such families are collectively poorer, regardless of ethnicity.

By 2006, gender continued to be the primary factor in income level, with the median earnings of African American men more than those black and non-black American women overall and in all educational levels. At the same time, among American men, income disparities were significant; the median income of African American men was approximately 76 cents for every dollar of their European American counterparts, although the gap narrowed somewhat with a rise in educational level.

Overall, the median earnings of African American men were 72 cents for every dollar earned of their Asian American counterparts, and $1.17 for every dollar earned by Hispanic men. On the other hand by 2006, among American women with post-secondary education, African American women have made significant advances; the median income of African American women was more than those of their Asian-, European- and Hispanic American counterparts with at least some college education.

African Americans are still underrepresented in government and employment. In 1999, the median income of African American families was $33,255 compared to $53,356 of European Americans. In times of economic hardship for the nation, African Americans suffer disproportionately from job loss and underemployment, with the black underclass being hardest hit. The phrase "last hired and first fired" is reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment figures. Nationwide, the October 2008 unemployment rate for African Americans was 11.1%, while the nationwide rate was 6.5%.

The income gap between black and white families is also significant. In 2005, employed blacks earned only 65% of the wages of whites, down from 82% in 1975. ''The New York Times'' reported in 2006 that in Queens, New York, the median income among African American families exceeded that of white families, which the newspaper attributed to the growth in the number of two-parent black families. It noted that Queens was the only county with more than 65,000 residents where that was true.

In 1999, the rate of births to unwed African American mothers was estimated by economist Walter E. Williams of George Mason University to be 70%. The poverty rate among single-parent black families was 39.5% in 2005, according to Williams, while it was 9.9% among married-couple black families. Among white families, the comparable rates were 26.4% and 6%.

According to ''Forbes'' magazine's "wealthiest American" lists, a 2000 net worth of $800 million dollars made Oprah Winfrey the richest African American of the 20th century; by contrast, the net worth of the 20th century's richest American, Bill Gates, who is of European descent, briefly hit $100 billion in 1999. In Forbes' 2007 list, Gates' net worth decreased to $59 billion while Winfrey's increased to $2.5 billion, making her the world's richest black person. Winfrey is also the first African American to make Business Week's annual list of America's 50 greatest philanthropists. BET founder Bob Johnson was also listed as a billionaire prior to an expensive divorce and as of 2009, had an estimated net worth of $550 million. Winfrey remains the only African American wealthy enough to rank among the country's 400 richest people. Some black entrepreneurs use their wealth to create new avenues for both African Americans and new opportunities for American business in general. Examples such as Tyler Perry who created new filming studios in Atlanta, Georgia which makes it possible to film movies and television shows outside of California.

Cultural influence in the United States

From their earliest presence in North America, African Americans have contributed literature, art, agricultural skills, foods, clothing styles, music, language, social and technological innovation to American culture. The cultivation and use of many agricultural products in the U.S., such as yams, peanuts, rice, okra, sorghum, grits, watermelon, indigo dyes, and cotton, can be traced to African and African American influences. Notable examples include George Washington Carver, who created 300 products from peanuts, 118 products from sweet potatoes, and 75 from pecans; and George Crum, who invented the potato chip in 1853.

African American music is one of the most pervasive African American cultural influences in the United States today and is among the most dominant in mainstream popular music. Hip hop, R&B;, funk, rock and roll, soul, blues, and other contemporary American musical forms originated in black communities and evolved from other black forms of music, including blues, doo-wop, barbershop, ragtime, bluegrass, jazz, and gospel music.

African American-derived musical forms have also influenced and been incorporated into virtually every other popular musical genre in the world, including country and techno. African American genres are the most important ethnic vernacular tradition in America, as they have developed independent of African traditions from which they arise more so than any other immigrant groups, including Europeans; make up the broadest and longest lasting range of styles in America; and have, historically, been more influential, interculturally, geographically, and economically, than other American vernacular traditions.

African Americans have also had an important role in American dance. Bill T. Jones, a prominent modern choreographer and dancer, has included historical African American themes in his work, particularly in the piece "Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land". Likewise, Alvin Ailey's artistic work, including his "Revelations" based on his experience growing up as an African American in the South during the 1930s, has had a significant influence on modern dance. Another form of dance, Stepping, is an African American tradition whose performance and competition has been formalized through the traditionally black fraternities and sororities at universities.

Many African American authors have written stories, poems, and essays influenced by their experiences as African Americans. African-American literature is a major genre in American literature. Famous examples include Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou.

African American inventors have created many widely used devices in the world and have contributed to international innovation. Norbert Rillieux created the technique for converting sugar cane juice into white sugar crystals. Moreover, Rillieux left Louisiana in 1854 and went to France, where he spent ten years working with the Champollions deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone. Most slave inventors were nameless, such as the slave owned by the Confederate President Jefferson Davis who designed the ship propeller used by the Confederate navy.

By 1913 over 1,000 inventions were patented by black Americans. Among the most notable inventors were Jan Matzeliger, who developed the first machine to mass-produce shoes, and Elijah McCoy, who invented automatic lubrication devices for steam engines. Granville Woods had 35 patents to improve electric railway systems, including the first system to allow moving trains to communicate. Garrett A. Morgan developed the first automatic traffic signal and gas mask.

Lewis Howard Latimer invented an improvement for the incandescent light bulb. More recent inventors include Frederick McKinley Jones, who invented the movable refrigeration unit for food transport in trucks and trains. Lloyd Quarterman worked with six other black scientists on the creation of the atomic bomb (code named the Manhattan Project.) Quarterman also helped develop the first nuclear reactor, which was used in the atomically powered submarine called the Nautilus.

A few other notable examples include the first successful open heart surgery, performed by Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, and the air conditioner, patented by Frederick McKinley Jones. Dr. Mark Dean holds three of the original nine patents on the computer on which all PCs are based. More current contributors include Otis Boykin, whose inventions included several novel methods for manufacturing electrical components that found use in applications such as guided missile systems and computers, and Colonel Frederick Gregory, who was not only the first black astronaut pilot but the person who redesigned the cockpits for the last three space shuttles. Gregory was also on the team that pioneered the microwave instrumentation landing system.

Political legacy

African Americans have fought in every war in the history of the United States.

The gains made by African Americans in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements not only obtained certain rights for African Americans, but changed American society in far-reaching and fundamentally important ways. Prior to the 1950s, Black Americans in the South were subject to de jure discrimination, or Jim Crow. They would often be the victims of extreme cruelty and violence, sometimes resulting in deaths: by the post WWII era, African Americans became increasingly discontented with their long-standing inequality. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., African Americans and their supporters challenged the nation to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed that all men are created equal ..."

The Civil Rights Movement marked a sea-change in American social, political, economic and civic life. It brought with it boycotts, sit-ins, demonstrations, court battles, bombings and other violence; prompted worldwide media coverage and intense public debate; forged enduring civic, economic and religious alliances; and disrupted and realigned the nation's two major political parties.

Over time, it has changed in fundamental ways the manner in which blacks and whites interact with and relate to one another. The movement resulted in the removal of codified, ''de jure'' racial segregation and discrimination from American life and law, and heavily influenced other groups and movements in struggles for civil rights and social equality within American society, including the Free Speech Movement, the disabled, women, Native Americans, and migrant workers.

The term "African American"

Political overtones

The term African American carries important political overtones. Earlier terms used to identify Americans of African ancestry were conferred upon the group by colonists and Americans of European ancestry. The terms were included in the wording of various laws and legal decisions which some thought were being used as tools of white supremacy and oppression. There developed among blacks in America a growing desire for a term of self-identification of their own choosing.

With the political consciousness that emerged from the political and social ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, blacks no longer approved of the term Negro. They believed it had suggestions of a moderate, accommodationist, even "Uncle Tom" connotation. In this period, a growing number of blacks in the United States, particularly African American youth, celebrated their blackness and their historical and cultural ties with the African continent. The Black Power movement defiantly embraced ''Black'' as a group identifier. It was a term social leaders themselves had repudiated only two decades earlier, but they proclaimed, "Black is beautiful".

In this same period, a smaller number of people favored ''Afro-American'', a common shortening (as is 'Anglo-American'). However, after the decline in popularity of the 'Afro' hairstyle in the late 1970s, the term fell out of use.

In the 1980s the term ''African American'' was advanced on the model of, for example, German-American or Irish-American to give descendents of American slaves and other American blacks who lived through the slavery-era a heritage and a cultural base. The term was popularized in black communities around the country via word of mouth and ultimately received mainstream use after Jesse Jackson publicly used the term in front of a national audience. Subsequently, major media outlets adopted its use.

Some such as Maulana Karenga and Owen Alik Shahadah argue African-American is more appropriate because it accurately articulates geography and historical origin. Thus linking a people to a continent as oppose to an abstract color. Others believe the term black is inaccurate because African Americans have a variety of skin tones. Surveys show that the majority of Black Americans have no preference for "African American" or "Black," although they have a slight preference for "Black" in personal settings and "African American" in more formal settings. Many African-Americans expressed a preference for the term, as it was formed in the same way as names for others of the many ethnic groups in the nation. Some argued further that, because of the historical circumstances surrounding the capture, enslavement and systematic attempts to de-Africanize blacks in the United States under chattel slavery, most African Americans are unable to trace their ancestry to a specific African nation; hence, the entire continent serves as a geographic marker.

For many, African American is more than a name expressive of cultural and historical roots. The term expresses pride in Africa and a sense of kinship and solidarity with others of the African diaspora—an embrace of pan-Africanism as earlier enunciated by prominent African thinkers such as Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois and George Padmore.

Who is African American?

Since 1977, in an attempt to keep up with changing social opinion, the United States government has officially classified black people (revised to ''black'' or ''African American'' in 1997) as "having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa." Other federal offices, such as the United States Census Bureau, adhere to the OMB standards on race in its data collection and tabulations efforts. In preparation for the United States 2010 Census, a marketing and outreach plan, called ''2010 Census Integrated Communications Campaign Plan'' (ICC) recognized and defined African Americans as black people born in the United States. From the ICC perspective, African Americans are one of three groups of black people in the United States

The ICC plan was to reach the three groups by acknowledging that each group has its own sense of community that is based on geography and ethnicity. The best way to market the census process toward any of the three groups is to reach them through their own unique communication channels and not treat the entire black population of the U.S. as though they are all African Americans with a single ethnic and geographical background. The U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Investigation categorizes black or African American people as "A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa" through racial categories used in the UCR Program adopted from the Statistical Policy Handbook (1978) and published by the Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards, U.S. Department of Commerce, derived from the 1977 OMB classification.

The African-American experience

In her book ''The End of Blackness'', as well as in an essay on the liberal website Salon, author Debra Dickerson has argued that the term "black" should refer strictly to the descendents of Africans brought to America as slaves, and not the sons and daughters of black immigrants who lack that ancestry. In her opinion, President Barack Obama, who is the son of a Kenyan immigrant, although technically African-American, is not black. She makes the argument that grouping all people of African descent together regardless of their unique ancestral circumstances would inevitably deny the lingering effects of slavery within the American community of slave descendents, in addition to denying black immigrants recognition of their own unique ancestral backgrounds. "Lumping us all together", Dickerson wrote, "erases the significance of slavery and continuing racism while giving the appearance of progress".

Similar viewpoints have been expressed by Stanley Crouch in a New York Daily News piece, Charles Kenzie Steele, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and African-American columnist David Ehrenstein of the LA Times who accused white liberals of flocking to blacks who were "Magic Negros", a term that refers to a black person with no past who simply appears to assist the mainstream white (as cultural protagonists/drivers) agenda. Ehrenstein went on to say "He's there to assuage white 'guilt' they feel over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history." said "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that." She has also rejected an immigrant designation for African-Americans and instead prefers the term "black" or "white" to denote the African and European U.S. founding populations.

Terms no longer in common use

The terms mulatto and colored were widely used until the second quarter of the 20th century, when they were considered outmoded and generally gave way to the use of ''negro''. By the 1940s, the term commonly was capitalized, but by the mid 1960s, it had acquired negative connotations. Today, in the culture of the United States, the term is considered inappropriate and is now rarely used and perceived as a pejorative.

The term Negro is largely out of use among the younger black generation, but is still used by a substantial block of older black Americans, particularly in the southern U.S. In Latin America, ''negro'', which translates as ''black'' is the term generally used to refer and describe black people and, similarly to ''mulatto'', it is not considered offensive at all in these regions. However, it is pronounced differently, with the ''e'' (a mid front unrounded vowel in American Spanish: , and a close-mid front unrounded vowel in Brazilian Portuguese: ) being closer to a sound that it is intermediate between phonemes found in English words such as pay and egg (in Spanish) or day, city and item (in Portuguese).

See also

Affirmative action

African-American art

African-American history

African-American literature

African-American music

African American Muslims

African American National Biography Project

African American Vernacular English

African American Women, 1960's

American Black Upper Class

American Civil War

Black church

Black feminism

Black Loyalist

Black nationalism

Military history of African Americans

Slavery in the United States

Diaspora:

African Americans in France

African diaspora

African immigrants to the United States

Afro-Latin American

American Black Indians

Americans of Igbo ancestry

Americo-Liberian

Black Hispanic and Latino Americans

Black Nova Scotians

Black people

Foreign-born Afro Americans

Sierra Leone Creole people

Lists:

Lists of African Americans

List of African-American-related topics

List of topics related to Black and African people

Terminology: Colored, Creole peoples, Negro, Nigger, Nigga

Notes

References

Further reading

Jack Salzman, ed., ''Encyclopedia of Afro-American culture and history'', New York, New York : Macmillan Library Reference USA, 1996.

''African American Lives'', edited by Henry L. Gates, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Oxford University Press, 2004—more than 600 biographies.

''From Slavery to Freedom. A History of African Americans'', by John Hope Franklin, Alfred Moss, McGraw-Hill Education 2001, standard work, first edition in 1947.

''Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia'', Darlene Clark Hine (Editor), Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Editor), Elsa Barkley Brown (Editor), Paperback Edition, Indiana University Press 2005.

External links

Richard Thompson Ford Name Games, ''Slate'', September 16, 2004. Article discussing the problems of defining ''African American''

"Of Arms & the Law: Don Kates on Afro-American Homicide Rates"

''Scientific American'' Magazine (June 2006) Trace Elements Reconnecting African-Americans to an ancestral past

"The Definition of Political Absurdity", ''San Francisco Chronicle'', March 2, 2007

African American archaeology in Sacramento, California pdf

African American archaeology in Oakland, California —See Part III, Chap 10

Black History related original documents and photos

President Obama's Speech to the NAACP on July 16, 2009—full video by ''MSNBC''

Black or African American?, Frank Newport. Gallup, September 28, 2007

The Long Journey of Black Americans - slideshow by ''The First Post''

Category:African American history Category:Ethnic groups in the United States Category:History of civil rights in the United States Category:Peoples of the African diaspora

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Leonard Bernstein ( ; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to ''The New York Times'', he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."

His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for ''West Side Story'', as well as ''Candide'', ''Wonderful Town'', ''On the Town'' and his own ''Mass''.

Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954, continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting while performing piano concertos simultaneously.

As a composer he was prolific, writing symphonies, ballet music, operas, chamber music, pieces for the piano, other orchestral and choral works, and other concert and incidental music, but the tremendous success of ''West Side Story'' remained unequaled by his other compositions.

Biography

Early life

He was born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents Jennie (née Resnick) and Samuel Joseph Bernstein, a hair-dressing supplies wholesaler originating from Rovno (now Ukraine). Despite his surname he was not related to film composer Elmer Bernstein. His family spent their summers at their vacation home in Sharon, Massachusetts. His grandmother insisted that his first name be ''Louis'', but his parents always called him ''Leonard'', which they preferred. He officially changed his name to ''Leonard'' when he was fifteen, shortly after his grandmother's death. However to his friends and many others he was simply known as "Lenny."

His father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman and owner of a bookstore in downtown Lawrence; it is standing today on the corners of Amesbury and Essex Streets. Sam initially opposed young Leonard's interest in music. Despite this, the elder Bernstein took him to orchestra concerts in his teenage years and eventually supported his music education. At a very young age, Bernstein listened to a piano performance and was immediately captivated; he subsequently began learning the piano seriously when the family acquired his cousin Lillian Goldman's unwanted piano. As a child, Bernstein attended the Garrison Grammar School and Boston Latin School. As a child he was very close to his younger sister Shirley, and would often play entire operas or Beethoven symphonies with her at the piano. He had a variety of piano teachers in his youth including Helen Coates who later became his secretary.

After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1935, Bernstein attended Harvard University, where he studied music with, amongst others, Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston, the author of many harmony and counterpoint textbooks. Although he majored in music with a final year thesis (1939) entitled ''"The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music"'' (reproduced in his book ''Findings''), Bernstein's main intellectual influence at Harvard was probably the aesthetics Professor David Prall, whose multidisciplinary outlook on the arts Bernstein shared for the rest of his life. One of his friends at Harvard was philosopher Donald Davidson, with whom he played piano four hands. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production Davidson mounted of Aristophanes' play ''The Birds'' in the original Greek. Bernstein reused some of this music in the ballet ''Fancy Free''. During his time at Harvard he was briefly an accompanist for the Harvard Glee Club. Bernstein also mounted a student production of ''The Cradle Will Rock'' directing its action from the piano as the composer Marc Blitzstein had done at the premiere. Blitzstein, who heard about the production, subsequently became a friend and influence (both musically and politically) on Bernstein.

Bernstein also met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos at this time. Although he never taught Bernstein, Mitropoulos's charisma and power as a musician was a major influence on Bernstein's eventual decision to take up conducting. Mitropoulos was not stylistically that similar to Bernstein, but he probably influenced some of Bernstein's later habits such as his conducting from the keyboard, his initial practice of conducting without a baton and perhaps his interest in Mahler. The other important influence that Bernstein first met during his Harvard years was composer Aaron Copland, whom he met at a concert and then at a party afterwards on Copland's Birthday in 1938. At the party Bernstein played Copland's ''Piano Variations'', a thorny work Bernstein loved without knowing anything about its composer until that evening. Although he was not formally Copland's student as such, Bernstein would regularly seek advice from Copland in the following years about his own compositions and would often cite him as "his only real composition teacher".

After completing his studies at Harvard in 1939 (graduating with a B.A. ''cum laude''), he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. During his time at Curtis, Bernstein studied conducting with Fritz Reiner (who anecdotally is said to have given Bernstein the only "A grade" he ever awarded), piano with Isabelle Vengerova, orchestration with Randall Thompson, counterpoint with Richard Stöhr, and score reading with Renée Longy Miquelle. Unlike his years at Harvard, Bernstein appears to not to have much enjoyed the formal training environment of Curtis, although often in later life he would mention Reiner when discussing his important teachers.

1940–1950

After he left Curtis, Bernstein lived in New York. He shared a flat with his friend Adolph Green and often accompanied Green, Betty Comden and Judy Holiday in a comedy troupe called The Reviewers who performed in Greenwich Village. He took jobs with a music publisher, transcribing music or producing arrangements under the pseudonym Lenny Amber (the German meaning of his name in English). During this period in New York City, Bernstein enjoyed an exuberant social life that included relationships with both men and women. In 1940, Bernstein began his study at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer institute, Tanglewood, in the conducting class of the orchestra's conductor, Serge Koussevitzky.

Bernstein's friendships with Copland (who was very close to Koussevitsky) and Mitropoulos were important in him being recommended for a place in the class. Other students in the class included Lukas Foss who also became a lifelong friend. Koussevitsky perhaps did not teach Bernstein much basic conducting technique (which he had already developed under Reiner), but instead became a sort of father figure to him, and was perhaps the major influence on Bernstein's emotional way of interpreting music. Bernstein later became Koussevitzky's conducting assistant and would later dedicate his ''second symphony, "The Age of Anxiety''" to him.

On November 14, 1943, having recently been appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he made his major conducting debut at sudden notice —and without any rehearsal—after Bruno Walter came down with the flu. The next day, ''The New York Times'' carried the story on their front page and their editorial remarked, "It's a good American success story. The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves." He became instantly famous because the concert was nationally broadcast, and afterwards started to appear as a guest conductor with many US orchestras. The program included works by Schumann, Miklos Rozsa, Wagner and Richard Strauss's ''Don Quixote'' with soloist Joseph Schuster, solo cellist of the orchestra. Before the concert Bernstein briefly spoke to Bruno Walter who discussed particular difficulties in the works he was to perform. It is possible to hear this concert (apart from the Wagner work) on a recording of the CBS radio broadcast that has been issued on CD by the orchestra. From 1945–47 Bernstein was the Music Director of the New York City Symphony Orchestra which had been founded the previous year by the conductor Leopold Stokowski. The orchestra (with support from the Mayor) was aimed at a different audience with more modern programs and cheaper tickets than the New York Philharmonic.

In addition to becoming known as a conductor, Bernstein also emerged as a composer in the same period. In January 1944 he conducted the premiere of his ''Jeremiah Symphony'' in Pittsburgh. His score to the ballet ''Fancy Free'' choreographed by Jerome Robbins opened in New York in April 1944 and this was later developed into the musical ''On the Town'' with lyrics by Comden and Green that opened on Broadway in December 1944.

After World War II, Bernstein's career on the international stage began to flourish. In 1946 he made his first trip to Europe conducting various orchestras and recorded Ravel's ''Piano Concerto in G'' as soloist and conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra. In 1946, he conducted opera for the first time, with the American première at Tanglewood of Benjamin Britten's ''Peter Grimes,'' which had been a Koussevitzky commission. That same year, Arturo Toscanini invited Bernstein to guest conduct two concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, one of which again featured Bernstein as soloist in the Ravel concerto.

In 1947, Bernstein conducted in Tel Aviv for the first time, beginning a life-long association with Israel. The next year he conducted an open air concert for troops at Beersheba in the middle of the desert during the Arab-Israeli war. In 1957, he conducted the inaugural concert of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv; he subsequently made many recordings there. In 1967, he conducted a concert on Mt. Scopus to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem. During the 1970s, Bernstein recorded his symphonies and other works with the Israel Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon.

In 1949, he conducted the world première of the ''Turangalîla-Symphonie'' by Olivier Messiaen, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Part of the rehearsal for the concert was released on CD by the orchestra. When Koussevitzky died two years later, Bernstein became head of the orchestral and conducting departments at Tanglewood, holding this position for many years.

1951–1959

After much personal struggle and a turbulent on-off engagement, he married Chilean actress Felicia Cohn Montealegre on September 10, 1951. One suggestion is that he chose to marry partly to dispel rumors about his private life to help secure a major conducting appointment, following advice from his mentor Dimitri Mitropoulos about the conservative nature of orchestra boards. Bernstein's sexuality has been a matter of speculation and debate. Arthur Laurents (Bernstein's collaborator in ''West Side Story'') said that Bernstein was "a gay man who got married. He wasn't conflicted about it at all. He was just gay." Shirley Rhoades Perle, another friend of Bernstein's, said that she thought "he required men sexually and women emotionally." But the early years of his marriage seem to have been happy, and no-one has suggested they didn't love one another. They had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and later Nina. There are reports though that Bernstein did sometimes have brief extramarital liaisons with young men, which several family friends have said his wife knew about.

In 1951, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the world première of the Symphony No. 2 of Charles Ives which was written around half a century earlier but never performed. Throughout his career Bernstein often talked about the music of Ives who died in 1954. The composer, old and frail, was unable (or some reports say "unwilling") to attend the concert, but his wife attended. He reportedly listened to a radio broadcast of it on a radio in his kitchen some days later. A recording of the "premiere" was released in a 10 CD box set ''Bernstein LIVE'' by the orchestra, but the notes indicate it was a repeat performance from three days later, and this is perhaps what Ives heard. In any case reports also differ on Ives' exact reaction, but some suggest he was thrilled and danced a little jig. Bernstein recorded the 2nd symphony with the orchestra in 1958 for Columbia and 1987 for Deutsche Grammophon. There is also a 1987 performance with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra available on DVD.

Bernstein was a visiting music professor from 1951–56 at Brandeis University and he founded the Creative Arts Festival there in 1952. He conducted various productions at the first festival including the premiere of his opera ''Trouble in Tahiti'' and Blitzstein's English version of Kurt Weill's ''Threepenny Opera''. The festival was named after him in 2005, becoming the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts. In 1953 he was the first US conductor to appear at La Scala in Milan, conducting Maria Callas in Cherubini's ''Medea''. The same year he produced his score to the musical ''Wonderful Town'' at very short notice, working again with old friends Comden and Green who wrote the lyrics.

In 1954 Bernstein made the first of his television lectures for the CBS arts program Omnibus. The live lecture, entitled "Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony", involved Bernstein explaining the work with the aid of musicians from the former NBC Symphony Orchestra (recently renamed the "Symphony of the Air") and a giant page of the score covering the floor. Bernstein subsequently performed concerts with the orchestra and recorded his Serenade for Violin with Isaac Stern. Further Omnibus lectures followed in 1955-8 (later on ABC and then NBC) covering Jazz, Conducting, American Musical Comedy, Modern Music, J.S. Bach and Grand Opera. These programs were made available in the USA in a DVD set in 2010.

In late 1956 Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in concerts that were to have been conducted by Guido Cantelli, who had tragically been killed in an air crash in Paris. This was the first time Bernstein had conducted the orchestra in subscription concerts since 1951. Partly due to these appearances, Bernstein was named the Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1957, replacing Dimitri Mitropoulos. He began his tenure in that position in 1958 having held the post jointly with Mitropoulos in 1957-8. In 1958 Bernstein and Mitropoulos took the New York Philharmonic on tour to South America. In his first season in sole charge Bernstein included a season-long survey of American classical music. Themed-programming of this sort was fairly novel at that time compared to the present day. Bernstein held the Music Directorship until 1969 (with a sabbatical in 1965) although he continued to conduct and make recordings with the orchestra for the rest of his life and was appointed "Laureate Conductor".

He became a well-known figure in the United States through his series of fifty-three televised Young People's Concerts for CBS, which grew out of his ''Omnibus'' programs. His first Young People's Concert was televised a few weeks after his tenure as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic began. He became as famous for his educational work in those concerts as for his conducting. The Bernstein Young People's Concerts were the first, and probably the most influential series of music appreciation programs ever produced on television, and were highly acclaimed by critics. Some of Bernstein's music lectures were released on records, with at least one winning a Grammy award. The programmes were shown in many countries around the world, often with Bernstein dubbed into other languages. Twenty-five of them were released on DVD by Kultur Video.

Prior to taking over the New York Philharmonic Bernstein produced the music for two shows. The first was for the operetta Candide which was first performed in 1956 with a libretto by Lillian Hellman based on Voltaire's novel. The second was Bernstein's collaboration with the choreographer Jerome Robbins, the writer Arthur Laurents and the lyricist Stephen Sondheim to produce the musical ''West Side Story''. The first three had worked on it intermittently since Robbins first suggested the idea in 1949. Finally, with the addition of Sondheim to the team and a period of concentrated effort, it received its Broadway premiere in 1957 and has since proven to be Bernstein's most popular and enduring score.

In 1959, he took the New York Philharmonic on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, portions of which were filmed by CBS. A highlight of the tour was Bernstein's performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, in the presence of the composer, who came on stage at the end to congratulate Bernstein and the musicians. In October, when Bernstein and the orchestra returned to the US, they recorded the symphony for Columbia. He recorded it for a second time with the orchestra on tour in Japan in 1979. Bernstein seems to have limited himself to only conducting certain Shostakovich symphonies: 1, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 14. He made two recordings of Shostakovich's ''Leningrad Symphony,'' one with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s and another one recorded live in 1988 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the only recording he ever made with them (along with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 1).

1960–1969

In 1960 Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic held a Mahler Festival to mark the centenary of the composer's birth. Bernstein, Walter and Mitropoulos conducted performances. The composer's widow, Alma attended some of Bernstein's rehearsals. In 1960 Bernstein also made his first commercial recording of a Mahler symphony (the fourth) and over the next seven years he made the first complete cycle of recordings of all nine of Mahler's completed symphonies. (All featured the New York Philharmonic except the 8th Symphony which was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra following a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1966.) The success of these recordings, along with Bernstein's concert performances and television talks, was an important part of the revival of interest in Mahler in the 1960s, especially in the US.

Other non-US composers that Bernstein championed to some extent at the time include the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (who was perhaps then only a little known in the US) and Jean Sibelius, whose popularity had perhaps by then started to fade. Bernstein eventually recorded a complete cycle in New York of Sibelius's symphonies and three of Nielsen's symphonies (Nos. 2, 4, and 5), as well as conducting recordings of his violin, clarinet and flute concertos. He also recorded Nielsen's 3rd Symphony with the Royal Danish Orchestra after a critically acclaimed public performance in Denmark. Bernstein championed US composers, especially those that he was close to like Aaron Copland, William Schuman and David Diamond. He also started to more extensively record his own compositions for Columbia Records. This included his 3 symphonies, his ballets and the ''Symphonic Dances'' from ''West Side Story'' with the New York Philharmonic. He also conducted an LP of his 1944 musical ''On The Town,'' the first (almost) complete recording of the original featuring several members of the original Broadway cast, including Betty Comden and Adolph Green. (The 1949 film version only contains four of Bernstein's original numbers.)

In one oft-reported incident, in April 1962 Bernstein appeared on stage before a performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with the pianist Glenn Gould. During rehearsals, Gould had argued for tempi much broader than normal, which did not reflect Bernstein's concept of the music. Bernstein gave a brief address to the audience starting with "Don't be frightened; Mr Gould is here..." and going on to "In a concerto, who is the boss (audience laughter)—the soloist or the conductor?" (Audience laughter grows louder). The answer is, of course, sometimes the one and sometimes the other, depending on the people involved." This speech was subsequently interpreted by Harold C. Schonberg, music critic for ''The New York Times'', as abdication of personal responsibility and an attack on Gould, whose performance Schonberg went on to criticize heavily. Bernstein always denied that this had been his intent and has stated that he made these remarks with Gould's blessing. Throughout his life, he professed admiration and friendship for Gould. Schonberg was often (though not always) harshly critical of Bernstein as a conductor during his tenure as Music Director. However his views were not shared by the audiences (with many full houses) and probably not by the musicians themselves (who had greater financial security arising from Bernstein's many TV and recording activities amongst other things).

In 1962 the New York Philharmonic moved from Carnegie Hall to Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) in the new Lincoln Center. The move was not without controversy because of acoustic problems with the new hall. Bernstein conducted the gala opening concert featuring vocal works by Mahler, Beethoven and Vaughan Williams, and the premiere of Aaron Copland's ''Connotations'', a serial-work that was merely politely received. During the interval Bernstein kissed the cheek of the President's wife Jacqueline Kennedy, a break with protocol that was commented on at the time. In 1961 Bernstein had conducted at President John F. Kennedy's pre-inaugural gala, and he was an occasional guest in the Kennedy White House. He also conducted at the funeral mass in 1968 for the late President Kennedy's brother Robert Kennedy.

In 1964 Bernstein conducted Franco Zeffirelli's production of Verdi's ''Falstaff'' at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1966 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Luchino Visconti's production of the same opera with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff. During his time in Vienna he also recorded the opera for Columbia Records and conducted his first subscription concert with the Vienna Philharmonic (which is made up of players from the Vienna State Opera) featuring Mahler's ''Das Lied von der Erde'' with Fischer-Dieskau and James King. He returned to the State Opera in 1968 for a production of Der Rosenkavalier and in 1970 for Otto Schenk's production of Beethoven's ''Fidelio''. Sixteen years later, at the State Opera, Bernstein conducted his sequel to ''Trouble in Tahiti,'' ''A Quiet Place.'' with the ORF orchestra. Bernstein's final farewell to the State Opera happened accidentally in 1989: following a performance of Modest Mussorgsky's ''Khovanshchina'', he unexpectedly entered the stage and embraced conductor Claudio Abbado in front of a cheering audience.

With his commitment to the New York Philharmonic and his many other activities, Bernstein had little time for composition during the 1960s. The two major works he produced at this time were his ''Kaddish Symphony'' dedicated to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy and the ''Chichester Psalms'' which he produced during a sabbatical year he took from the Philharmonic in 1965 to concentrate on composition. To try and have more time for composition was probably a major factor in his decision to step down as Music Director of the Philharmonic in 1969, and to never accept such as position anywhere again.

1970–1979

After stepping down from the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein continued to appear with them in most years until his death, and he toured with them to Europe in 1976 and to Asia in 1979. He also strengthened his relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra – he conducted all nine completed Mahler symphonies with them (plus the adagio from the 10th) in the period from 1967–76. All of these were filmed for Unitel with the exception of the 1967 Mahler 2nd, which instead Bernstein filmed with the London Symphony Orchestra in Ely Cathedral in 1973. In the late 1970s Bernstein conducted a complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic, and cycles of Brahms and Schumann were to follow in the 1980s. Other orchestras he conducted on numerous occasions in the 1970s include the Israel Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

In 1970 Bernstein wrote and narrated a ninety-minute program filmed on location in and around Vienna as a celebration of Beethoven's 200th birthday. It featured parts of Bernstein's rehearsals and performance for the Otto Schenk production of ''Fidelio'', Bernstein playing the 1st piano concerto and the Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic and the young Placido Domingo amongst the soloists. The program was first telecast in 1970 on Austrian and British television, and then on CBS in the US on Christmas Eve 1971. The show, originally entitled ''Beethoven's Birthday: A Celebration in Vienna,'' won an Emmy and was issued on DVD in 2005.

Like many of his friends and colleagues, Bernstein had been involved in various left wing causes and organizations since the 1940s. He was blacklisted by the US State Department and CBS in the early 1950s, but unlike others his career was not greatly affected, and he was never required to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. His political life received substantial press coverage though in 1970 due to a gathering hosted at his Manhattan apartment. Bernstein and his wife held the event seeking to raise awareness and money for the defense of several members of the Black Panther Party against a variety of charges. ''The New York Times'' initially covered the gathering as a lifestyle item, but later posted an editorial harshly unfavorable to Bernstein following generally negative reaction to the widely publicized story. This reaction culminated in June 1970 with the appearance of "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", an essay by satirist Tom Wolfe featured on the cover of the ''New York'' Magazine. The article contrasted the Bernsteins' comfortable lifestyle in one of the world's most expensive neighborhoods with the anti-establishment politics of the Black Panthers. It led to the popularization of "radical chic" as a critical term. Both Bernstein and his wife Felicia responded to the criticism, arguing that they were motivated not by a shallow desire to express fashionable sympathy but by their concern for civil liberties.

Bernstein's major compositions during the 1970s were probably his ''MASS: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers''; his score for the ballet ''Dybbuk''; his orchestral vocal work ''Songfest''; and his US bicentenary musical ''1600 Pennsylvania Avenue'' written with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner which was his first real theatrical flop, and last original broadway show. The world premiere of Bernstein's ''MASS'' took place on September 8, 1971. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., it was partly intended as an anti-war statement. Hastily written in places, the work represented a fusion not only of different religious traditions (Latin liturgy, Hebrew prayer and plenty of contemporary English lyrics) but also of different musical styles including classical and rock music. It was originally a target of criticism from the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand, and contemporary music critics who objected to its Broadway/populist elements on the other. In the present day it is perhaps seen as less blasphemous and more a piece of its era – in 2000 it was even performed in the Vatican.

In 1972 Bernstein recorded Bizet's ''Carmen,'' with Marilyn Horne in the title role and James McCracken as Don Jose, after leading several stage performances of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera. The recording was one of the first in stereo to use the original spoken dialogue between the sung portions of the opera, rather than the musical recitatives that were composed by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet's death. The recording was Bernstein's first for Deutsche Grammophon and won a Grammy.

Bernstein was appointed in 1973 to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair as Professor of Poetry at his alma mater, Harvard University, and delivered a series of six televised lectures on music with musical examples played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Taking the title from a Charles Ives work, he called the series "The Unanswered Question"; it was a set of interdisciplinary lectures in which he borrowed terminology from contemporary linguistics to analyze and compare musical construction to language. The lectures are presently available in both book and DVD form. Noam Chomsky wrote in 2007 on the Znet forums about the linguistic aspects of the lecture: "I spent some time with Bernstein during the preparation and performance of the lectures. My feeling was that he was onto something, but I couldn't really judge how significant it was."

A major period of upheaval in Bernstein's personal life began in 1976 when he took the decision that he could no longer repress his homosexuality and he left his wife Felicia for a period to live with the writer Tom Cothran. The next year she was diagnosed with lung cancer and eventually Bernstein moved back in with her and cared for her until she died on June 16, 1978. Cothran himself died of AIDS in 1981. Bernstein is reported to have often spoken of his terrible guilt over his wife's death. Most biographies of Bernstein describe that his lifestyle became more excessive and his personal behavior sometimes cruder after her death. However his public standing and many of his close friendships appear to have remained unaffected, and he resumed his busy schedule of musical activity.

In 1978, Bernstein return to the Vienna State Opera to conduct a revival of the Otto Schenk production of ''Fidelio,'' now featuring Gundula Janowitz and Rene Kollo in the lead roles. At the same time, Bernstein made a studio recording of the opera for Deutsche Grammophon and the opera itself was filmed by Unitel and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in late 2006. In May 1978, the Israel Philharmonic played two US concerts under his direction to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Orchestra under that name. On consecutive nights, the Orchestra, with the Choral Arts Society of Washington, performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at Carnegie Hall in New York.

In 1979, Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for the first and only time, in two charity concerts for Amnesty International involving performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The invitation for the concerts had come from the orchestra and not from its principal conductor Herbert von Karajan. There has been speculation about why Karajan never invited Bernstein to conduct his orchestra. (Karajan did conduct the New York Philharmonic during Bernstein's tenure.) The full reasons will probably never be known – reports suggest they were on friendly terms when they met, but sometimes practiced a little mutual one-upmanship. One of the concerts was broadcast on radio and was posthumously released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon.

1980–1990

Bernstein received the Kennedy Center Honors award in 1980. For the rest of the 1980s he continued to conduct, teach, compose and produce the occasional TV documentary. His most significant compositions of the decade were probably his opera ''A Quiet Place'' which he wrote with Stephen Wadsworth and which premiered (in its original version) in Houston in 1983; his ''Divertimento for Orchestra''; his ''Halil'' for flute and orchestra, his ''Concerto for Orchestra "Jubilee Games"''; and his song cycle ''Arias and Barcarolles'', which was named after a comment President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made to him in the 1950s.

In 1982 in the US, PBS aired an 11-part series of Bernstein's late 1970s films for Unitel of the Vienna Philharmonic playing all nine Beethoven symphonies and various other works. Bernstein gave spoken introduction and actor Maximilian Schell was also featured on the programs, reading from Beethoven's letters. The original films have since been released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon. In addition to conducting in New York, Vienna and Israel, Bernstein was a regular guest conductor of other orchestras in the 1980s. These included the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam with whom he recorded Mahler's First, Fourth, and Ninth Symphonies amongst other works; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich with whom he recorded Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'', Haydn's ''Creation'', Mozart's ''Requiem'' and ''Mass in C Minor''; and the orchestra of Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome with whom he recorded some Debussy and Puccini's ''La Boheme''.

In 1982, he and Ernest Fleischmann founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute as a summer training academy along the lines of Tanglewood. Bernstein served as Artistic Director and taught conducting there until 1984. Around the same time he performed and recorded some of his own works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. Bernstein was also at the time a committed supporter of Nuclear Disarmament. In 1985 he took the European Community Youth Orchestra in a "Journey for Peace" tour around Europe and to Japan.

In 1985, he conducted a recording of ''West Side Story'', the first time he had conducted the entire work. The recording, featuring what some critics felt were miscast opera singers such as Kiri Te Kanawa, José Carreras, and Tatiana Troyanos in the leading roles, was nevertheless an international bestseller. A TV documentary showing the making of the recording was made at the same time and is available on DVD.

In his later years, Bernstein's life and work was celebrated around the world (as it has been since his death). The Israel Philharmonic celebrated his involvement with them at Festivals in Israel and Austria in 1977. In 1986 the London Symphony Orchestra mounted a Bernstein Festival in London with one concert that Bernstein himself conducted attended by the Queen. In 1988 Bernstein's 70th Birthday was celebrated by a lavish televised gala at Tanglewood featuring many performers who had worked with him over the years.

In December 1989 Bernstein conducted live performances and recorded in the studio his operetta ''Candide'' with the London Symphony Orchestra. The recording starred Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Adolph Green and Christa Ludwig in the leading roles. The use of opera singers in some roles perhaps fitted the style of operetta better than some critics had thought was the case for West Side Story, and the recording (released posthumously in 1991) was universally praised. One of the live concerts from the Barbican Centre in London is available on DVD. ''Candide'' had had a troubled history, with many re-writes and writers involved. Bernstein's concert and recording were based on a "final" version that had been first performed by Scottish Opera in 1988. The opening night (which Bernstein attended in Glasgow) was conducted by Bernstein's former student John Mauceri.

On December 25, 1989, Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus (Playhouse) as part of a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had conducted the same work in West Berlin the previous day. The concert was broadcast live in more than twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. For the occasion, Bernstein reworded Friedrich Schiller's text of the ''Ode to Joy,'' substituting the word ''Freiheit'' (freedom) for ''Freude'' (joy). Bernstein, in his spoken introduction said that they had "taken the liberty" of doing this because of a "most likely phony" story, apparently believed in some quarters, that Schiller wrote an "Ode to Freedom" that is now presumed lost. Bernstein added, "I'm sure that Beethoven would have given us his blessing."

In the summer of 1990, Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. Like his earlier activity in Los Angeles, this was a summer training school for musicians modeled on Tanglewood, and is still in existence. Bernstein was already at this time suffering from the lung disease that would lead to his death. In his opening address Bernstein said that he had decided to devote what time he had left to education. A video showing Bernstein speaking and rehearsing at the first Festival is available on DVD in Japan.

Bernstein made his final performance as a conductor at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, with the Boston Symphony playing Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" from ''Peter Grimes'', and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. He suffered a coughing fit in the middle of the Beethoven performance which almost caused the concert to break down. The concert was later issued on CD by Deutsche Grammophon.

He announced his retirement from conducting on October 9, 1990, and died of pneumonia and a pleural tumor five days later. He was 72 years old. A longtime heavy smoker, he had battled emphysema from his mid-50s. On the day of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, construction workers removed their hats and waved, yelling "Goodbye, Lenny." Bernstein is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York next to his wife and with a copy of Mahler's Fifth lying across his heart.

Influence and characteristics as a conductor

Bernstein was one of the major figures in orchestral conducting in the second half of the 20th century. He was held in high regard amongst many musicians, including the members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, evidenced by his honorary membership; the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he was President; and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he appeared regularly as guest conductor. He was probably the main conductor from the 1960s onwards who acquired a sort of superstar status similar to that of Herbert von Karajan, although unlike Karajan he conducted relatively little opera and part of Bernstein's fame was based on his role as a composer. As the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, his rise to prominence was a factor in overcoming the perception of the time that the top conductors were necessarily trained in Europe.

Bernstein's conducting was characterized by extremes of emotion with the rhythmic pulse of the music conveyed visually through his balletic podium manner. Musicians often reported that his manner in rehearsal was the same as in concert. As he got older his performances tended to be overlaid to a greater extent with a personal expressiveness which often divided critical opinion. Extreme examples of this style can be found in his Deutsche Grammophon recordings of Nimrod from Elgar's ''Enigma Variations'' (1982), the end of Mahler's 9th Symphony (1985), and the finale of Tchaikovsky's ''Pathetique Symphony'' (1986), where in each case the tempos are well below those typically chosen.

Bernstein performed a wide repertoire from the baroque era to the 20th century, although perhaps from the 1970s onwards he tended to focus more on music from the romantic era. He was considered especially accomplished with the works of Gustav Mahler and with American composers in general, including George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and of course himself. Some of his recordings of works by these composers would likely appear on many music critics' lists of recommended recordings. A list of his other well-thought-of recordings would probably include individual works from Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Nielsen, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich, among others. His recordings of ''Rhapsody in Blue'' (full-orchestra version) and ''An American in Paris'' for Columbia Records, released in 1959, are considered definitive by many, although Bernstein cut the ''Rhapsody'' slightly, and his more 'symphonic' approach with slower tempi is quite far from Gershwin's own conception of the piece, evident from his two recordings. (Oscar Levant, Earl Wild, and others come closer to Gershwin's own style.) Bernstein never conducted Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, or ''Porgy and Bess,'' although he did discuss the latter in his article ''Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?'', originally published in ''The New York Times'' and later reprinted in his 1959 book ''The Joy of Music.''

In addition to being an active conductor, Bernstein was a very influential teacher of conducting. During his many years of teaching at Tanglewood and elsewhere, he directly taught or mentored many conductors who are performing now, such as Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Alexander Frey, Paavo Järvi, John Mauceri, Eiji Oue, Seiji Ozawa (who made his US TV debut as the guest conductor on one of the ''Young People's Concerts''), Carl St.Clair, and Michael Tilson Thomas. He also undoubtedly influenced the career choices of many US musicians who grew up watching his television programmes in the 1950s and 60s.

Recordings

Bernstein recorded extensively from the 1950s until just a few months before his death. Aside from a few early recordings in the mid-1940s for RCA Victor, Bernstein recorded primarily for Columbia Masterworks Records, especially when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic. His typical pattern of recording at that time was to record major works in the studio immediately after they were presented in the orchestra's subscription concerts, with any spare time used to record short orchestral showpieces and similar works. Many of these performances were digitally remastered and reissued by Sony as part of their 100 CD "Royal Edition" and their later "Bernstein Century" series. In 2010 many of these recordings were repackaged in a 60 CD "Bernstein Symphony Edition".

His later recordings (starting with Bizet's Carmen in 1972) were mostly made for Deutsche Grammophon, though he would occasionally return to the Columbia Masterworks label. Notable exceptions include recordings of Gustav Mahler's ''Song of the Earth'' and Mozart's 15th piano concerto and "Linz" symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca Records (1966); Berlioz's ''Symphonie fantastique'' and ''Harold in Italy'' (1976) for EMI; and Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'' (1981) for Philips Records, a label that like Deutsche Grammophon was part of PolyGram at that time. Unlike his studio recordings for Columbia Masterworks, most of his later Deutsche Grammophon recordings were taken from live concerts (or edited together from several concerts with additional sessions to correct errors). Many replicate repertoire that he recorded in the 1950s and 60s.

In addition to his audio recordings, many of Bernstein's concerts from the 1970s onwards were recorded on motion picture film by the German film company Unitel. This included a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies (with the Vienna Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra), as well as complete cycles of the Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann symphonies recorded at the same series of concerts as the audio recordings by Deutsche Grammophon. Many of these films appeared on Laserdisc and are now on DVD.

In total Bernstein was awarded 16 Grammys for his recordings in various categories including several for recordings released after his death. He was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1985.

Influence and characteristics as a composer

Bernstein was an eclectic composer whose music fused elements of jazz, Jewish music, theatre music and the work of older composers like Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, George Gershwin, and Marc Blitzstein. Some of his works, especially his score for ''West Side Story,'' helped bridge the gap between classical and popular music. His music was rooted in tonality but in some works like his ''Kaddish Symphony'' and the opera ''A Quiet Place'' he mixed in 12-tone elements. Bernstein himself said his main motivation for composing was "to communicate" and that all his pieces, including his symphonies and concert works, "could in some sense be thought of as 'theatre' pieces." According to the League of American orchestras, he was the second most frequently performed American composer by US orchestras in 2008-9 behind Copland, and he was the 16th most frequently performed composer overall by US orchestras. (Some performances were probably due to the 90th anniversary of his birth in 2008.) His most popular pieces were the ''Overture to Candide'', the ''Symphonic Dances from West Side Story'', the ''Serenade for Violin, Strings, Harp and Percussion'' and the ''Three Dance Episodes from On the Town''. His shows ''West Side Story'', ''On the Town'', ''Wonderful Town'' and ''Candide'' are regularly performed, and his symphonies and concert works are programmed from time to time by orchestras around the world. Since his death many of his works have been commercially recorded by artists other than himself. The ''Serenade'', which has been recorded more than 10 times, is probably his most recorded work not taken from an actual theatre piece.

Despite the fact that he was a popular success as a composer, Bernstein himself is reported to have been disillusioned that some of his more serious works were not rated more highly by critics, and that he himself had not been able to devote more time to composing because of his conducting and other activities. Professional criticism of Bernstein's music often involves discussing the degree to which he created something new as art versus simply skillfully borrowing and fusing together elements from others. In the late 1960s, Bernstein himself reflected that his eclecticism was in part due to his lack of lengthy periods devoted to composition, and that he was still seeking to enrich his own personal musical language in the manner of the great composers of the past, all of whom had borrowed elements from others. Perhaps the harshest criticism he received from some critics in his lifetime though was directed at works like his ''Kaddish Symphony'', his ''MASS'' and the opera ''A Quiet Place'', where they found the underlying message of the piece or the text as either mildly embarrassing, clichéd or offensive. Despite this, all these pieces have been performed, discussed and reconsidered since his death.

Although he taught conducting, Bernstein was not a teacher of composition as such, and he has no direct composing heirs. Perhaps the closest are composers like John Adams who from the 1970s onwards indirectly adopted elements of his eclectic, theatrical style.

Works

Ballet

''Fancy Free'', 1944

''Facsimile- Choreographic Essay for Orchestra'', 1946

''Dybbuk'' (ballet), 1974

Opera

''Trouble in Tahiti'', 1952

''Candide'', 1956 (new libretto in 1973, operetta final revised version in 1989)

''A Quiet Place'', 1983

Musicals

''On The Town'', 1944

''Wonderful Town'', 1953

''West Side Story'', 1957

''The Race to Urga'' (incomplete), 1969

"By Bernstein" (a Revue), 1975

''1600 Pennsylvania Avenue'', 1976

''The Madwoman of Central Park West'', (contributed to) 1979

Incidental music and other theatre

''Peter Pan'', 1950

''The Lark'', 1955

''The Firstborn'', 1958

''Mass'' (theatre piece for singers, players and dancers), 1971

Film scores

''On the Town'', (only part of his music was used), 1949

''On the Waterfront'', 1954

''West Side Story'', 1961

Orchestral

Symphony No. 1, ''Jeremiah'', 1942

''Fancy Free'' and ''Three Dance Variations from "Fancy Free,"'', concert premiere 1946

''Three Dance Episodes from "On the Town,"'' concert premiere 1947

Symphony No. 2, ''The Age of Anxiety'', (after W. H. Auden) for Piano and Orchestra, 1949 (revised in 1965)

''Serenade for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp and Percussion (after Plato's "Symposium")'', 1954

''Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs'' for Solo Clarinet and Jazz Ensemble, 1949

''Symphonic Suite from "On the Waterfront"'', 1955

''Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story"'', 1961

Symphony No. 3, ''Kaddish'', for Orchestra, Mixed Chorus, Boys' Choir, Speaker and Soprano Solo, 1963 (revised in 1977)

''Dybbuk'', Suites No. 1 and 2 for Orchestra, concert premieres 1975

''Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers and Orchestra'', 1977

''Three Meditations from "Mass"'' for Violoncello and Orchestra, 1977

''Slava! A Political Overture for Orchestra, 1977

''Divertimento for Orchestra'', 1980

''Halil'', nocturne for Solo Flute, Piccolo, Alto Flute, Percussion, Harp and Strings, 1981

''Concerto for Orchestra'', 1989 (Originally ''Jubilee Games'' from 1986, revised in 1989)

Overture to Candide

Choral

''Hashkiveinu'' for Cantor (tenor), Mixed Chorus and Organ, 1945

''Missa Brevis'' for Mixed Chorus and Countertenor Solo, with Percussion, 1988

''Chichester Psalms'' for Boy Soprano (or Countertenor), Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra, 1965 (Reduced version for Organ, Harp and Percussion)

Chamber music

Piano Trio, 1937, Boosey & Hawkes

Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, 1939

Brass Music, 1959

Dance Suite, 1988

Vocal music

''I Hate Music: A cycle of Five Kids Songs for Soprano and Piano'', 1943

''Big Stuff'', sung by Billie Holiday

''La Bonne Cuisine: Four Recipes for Voice and Piano'', 1948

''Silhouette (Galilee)'', 1951

''Two Love Songs'', 1960

''So Pretty'', 1968

''Piccola Serenata'', 1988

''Arias and Barcarolles'' for Mezzo-Soprano, Baritone and Piano four-hands, 1988

Piano music

''Music for Two Pianos'', 1937

''Piano Sonata'', 1938

''7 Anniversaries'', 1944

''4 Anniversaries'', 1948

''5 Anniversaries'', 1952

''Bridal Suite'', 1960

''Moby Diptych'', 1981 (republished as Anniversaries nos. 1 and 2 in Thirteen Anniversaries)

''Touches'', 1981

''13 Anniversaries'', 1988

Other music

Other occasional works, written as gifts and other forms of memorial and tribute

"The Skin of Our Teeth": An aborted work from which Bernstein took material to use in his "Chichester Psalms"

"Simhu Na" (arrangement of traditional song)

"Waltz for Mippy III" for Tuba and Piano

"Elegy for Mippy II" for Trombone alone

"Elegy for Mippy I" for Horn and Piano

"Rondo for Lifey" for Trumpet and Piano

"Fanfare for Bima" for Brass Quartet: composed in 1947 as a birthday tribute to Koussevitzky using the tune he whistled to call his cocker spaniel

"Shivaree: A Fanfare" for Double Brass Ensemble and Percussion. 1970. Commissioned by and dedicated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in honor of its Centenary. Musical material later used in "Mass."

Bibliography

Bernstein, Leonard. [1976] ''The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard'', Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-92001-5.

Videography

''The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard''. West Long Branch, New Jersey: Kultur Video. VHS ISBN 1561275700. DVD ISBN 0769715702. (videotape of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard in 1973.)

''Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic''. West Long Branch, New Jersey: Kultur Video. DVD ISBN 0769715036.

''Bernstein on Beethoven: A Celebration in Vienna/Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1.'' West Long Branch, Kultur Video. DVD

''Leonard Bernstein: Omnibus – The Historic TV Broadcasts'' ,2010, E1 Ent.

''Bernstein: Reflections'' (1978), Euroarts.

''Bernstein/Beethoven'' (1982), Deustche Grammophon, DVD

''Bernstein Conducts "West Side Story" '' (1985) (retitled ''The Making of West Side Story'' in re-releases) Deutsche Grammophon, DVD

''"The Rite of Spring" in Rehearsal''

Awards

Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1951

Sonning Award (Denmark), 1956

Ditson Conductor's Award, 1958

George Peabody Medal – Johns Hopkins University, 1980

Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 1987

Royal Philarmonic Society Gold Medal (UK), 1987

Knight Grand Cross Order of Merit (Italy), 1989

Grammy Award for Best Album for Children

Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance

Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance

Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording

Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance

Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance

Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition

Grammy Award for Best Classical Album

Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award

Tony Award for Best Musical

Special Tony Award

Further reading

()

References

External links

Leonard Bernstein official site

Discography

The Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress Music Division

Discography at SonyBMG Masterworks

Bernstein's Boston, a Harvard University research project

FBI file on Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts

Gay Great – Leonard Bernstein

''Radical Chic'', a book by Tom Wolfe describing a gathering at Bernstein's apartment of New York's social elite and the Black Panther Party.

Leonard Bernstein: A Total Embrace of Music, written by Peter Gutmann, music journalist.

Arias and Barcarolles, The Leonard Bernstein Pages

Leonard Bernstein's maximum card from Israel

Obituary, ''New York Times'', October 15, 1990

''Leonard Bernstein: American Original'' (HarperCollins, 2008) Chapters by Alan Rich, Paul Boyer, Carol J. Oja, Tim Page, Burton Bernstein, Jonathan Rosenberg, Joseph Horowitz, Bill McGlaughlin, James M. Keller, John Adams

Category:1918 births Category:1990 deaths Category:20th-century classical composers Category:American classical pianists Category:American conductors (music) Category:American film score composers Category:American musical theatre composers Category:Burials at Green-Wood Cemetery Category:Deaths from pneumonia Category:George Peabody Medal winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:LGBT composers Category:LGBT Jews Category:LGBT parents Category:LGBT musicians from the United States Category:MacDowell Colony fellows Category:Opera composers Category:People from Lawrence, Massachusetts Category:Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medallists Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:Kennedy Center honorees Category:Ballet composers Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Brandeis University faculty Category:Curtis Institute of Music alumni Category:American expatriates in Austria Category:People from Sharon, Massachusetts Category:Jewish American classical composers Category:Commanders Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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birth date	March 18, 1905
birth place	Cleveland, OH, United States
death date	November 24, 1982
death place	New York, NY, United States
position	QuarterbackHead Coach
college	Michigan
databasefootball	FRIEDBEN01
player	yes
years	192719281929–19311932–1934
teams	Cleveland BulldogsDetroit WolverinesNew York GiantsBrooklyn Dodgers (NFL)
databasefootballcoach	FRIEDBEN01
coach	yes
coachingteams	New York GiantsBrooklyn Dodgers (NFL)Brandeis University
coachingyears	193019321951–1959
collegehof	20078
hof	241
hofyear	2005 }}

Benjamin "Benny" Friedman (March 18, 1905 – November 24, 1982) was an American football quarterback who played for the University of Michigan (1924–1926), Cleveland Bulldogs (1927), Detroit Wolverines (1928), New York Giants (1929–1931), and Brooklyn Dodgers (1932–1934).

He is generally considered the first great passer in professional football. In 2005, Friedman was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Playing career

Friedman became the starting quarterback and placekicker midway through his sophomore year at Michigan (On defense, he played in the backfield). In 1925 and 1926, he led the Wolverines to consecutive 7–1 seasons and first place finishes in the Big Ten Conference. Against Indiana in 1925, Friedman accounted for 44 points, throwing for five touchdowns and kicking two field goals and eight extra points. The following year, he was a consensus first-team All-American and most valuable player of the Big Ten.

In 1927, Friedman joined his hometown Cleveland Bulldogs in the National Football League. After a successful rookie season in Cleveland, he had a spectacular second year playing for the Detroit Wolverines. In 1928, Friedman led the NFL in passing touchdowns, rushing touchdowns and scoring as well as extra points (He may have led in other categories, too, but the NFL did not record yardage stats in those days.) Friedman's performance so impressed New York Giants owner Tim Mara that Mara bought the whole Wolverines team just so he could have the rights to the quarterback. With the Giants in 1929, Friedman led the league again with 20 touchdown passes. Friedman's passing proficiency was especially noteworthy considering that most teams rarely threw the ball in those days. The football used at the time was rounder and more difficult to throw. Friedman called plays at the line of scrimmage and threw on first and second down, when most teams waited until third down. "Benny revolutionized football. He forced the defenses out of the dark ages." George Halas later said. No NFL team would surpass 20 passing touchdowns in a season until 1942. Friedman often experienced media bias because of his Jewishness, being referred to in the press by names like "Jew boy" and "descendant of Palestine"

In 1931, Friedman suffered a knee injury that hampered the rest of his career. He moved to the Brooklyn football Dodgers in 1932 as a player-coach while simultaneously serving as an assistant coach at Yale University. He led the league in completion percentage in 1933 and retired after the 1934 season.

Retirement

After leaving the Dodgers, Friedman coached City College of New York until 1941. For decades afterward, the college's beaver mascot took on the moniker "Benny the Beaver." He served in the Navy during World War II. He then moved to Brandeis University in Massachusetts, where he served as athletic director from 1949 to 1961 and head football coach from 1951 to 1959, when the football team was disbanded as part of a cost-cutting effort.

Friedman suffered from heart disease and diabetes in his later years, requiring a leg amputation in 1982. Despondent over his health and inability to get into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, he took his own life on November 24 of that year.

Despite his impressive numbers, Friedman was not chosen for the Hall of Fame until 2005. Some people attributed this to his relentless self-promotion and campaigning for induction, which was considered bad form, while others attribute it to latent prejudice against him for his racial background.

Friedman is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, and of the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

See also

History of the New York Giants (1925-1978)

Michigan Wolverines Football All-Americans

University of Michigan Athletic Hall of Honor

List of select Jewish football players

Notes

References

Gottehrer, Barry. ''The Giants of New York, the history of professional football's most fabulous dynasty.'' New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963 OCLC 1356301

External links

''Pro Football Hall of Fame:'' Member profile

''College Football Hall of Fame:'' Member profile

Article from the Pro Football Hall of Fame

Jews in Sports: Benny Friedman

"'Jewish Johnny Unitas' finally inducted into Pro Football Hall of Fame" by Ed Sherman, Jewish World Review, Aug. 10, 2005.

Benny Friedman Biography at J-Grit

Other sources

Carroll, Bob, et al. (1999). ''Total Football II''. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-270174-6.

Category:1905 births Category:1982 deaths Category:Players of American football from Ohio Category:People from Cleveland, Ohio Category:American football quarterbacks Category:Michigan Wolverines football players Category:Cleveland Bulldogs players Category:New York Giants players Category:New York Giants coaches Category:Brooklyn Dodgers (NFL) players Category:Brooklyn Dodgers (NFL) coaches Category:College Football Hall of Fame inductees Category:Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees Category:Jewish American sportspeople Category:Brandeis University faculty Category:Players of American football who committed suicide Category:Suicides in New York

de:Benny Friedman

Spiro Malas (born 28 January 1933 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American bass-baritone opera singer.

Malas made his operatic debut in 1959 in his native Baltimore and in 1960 he won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. He made his New York debut at the New York City Opera where he came to the attention of Joan Sutherland and her husband, the conductor Richard Bonynge. He was subsequently asked to tour Australia with the Sutherland/Williamson International Opera Company. This led to appearances at London's Covent Garden, the New York Metropolitan Opera (1983–84) and Chicago Lyric Opera.

Malas first performed at the Metropolitan Opera as Sgt. Sulpice in ''La fille du régiment'' opposite Dame Joan and Alfredo Kraus. Since then, he has sung there in ''Il barbiere di Siviglia'', ''La bohème'', ''Les contes d'Hoffmann'', ''Die Fledermaus'', ''Eugene Onegin'', ''L'elisir d'amore'', ''Lulu'', ''Manon Lescaut'', ''Der Rosenkavalier'', ''Salome'', ''Tosca'', and ''Werther''. He has also appeared there in two new productions by Sir Peter Hall; as Zuniga in ''Carmen'', and as Dr. Bartolo in ''Le nozze di Figaro''. Mr. Malas has also been seen on the Metropolitan Opera stage as Haly in ''L'italiana in Algeri'' opposite Marilyn Horne, and Capulet in Roméo et Juliette.

He has sung leading roles in the major opera houses in Rome, Naples, Salzburg, Vienna, and Florence, has appeared in televised opera, with leading symphony orchestras, and has recorded the operatic repertoire with notables such as Luciano Pavarotti, Beverly Sills, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and Sutherland.

A leading bass-baritone with the New York City Opera for many years, he has also sustained a career in television, having appeared in ''Spenser: For Hire'', ''The Equalizer'', ''Ryan's Hope'', ''One Life to Live'', ''Law & Order'' and ''Sex and the City''. The ''New York Times'''s Frank Rich, commented on Mr. Malas' Drama Desk Award nominated portrayal of the immigrant farmer, Tony Esposito in the Broadway revival of ''The Most Happy Fella'' "As acted by Mr. Malas, Tony's inner growth and redemption become the very soul of musical drama, especially as delineated in one gorgeous Loesser song after another."

In addition to his teaching at Barnard College and Columbia University, Malas also serves on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and Curtis Institute of Music.

He is a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.

Malas is married to Marlena Kleinman Malas, a voice teacher in New York. They have two sons, Nicol and Alexis.

Recordings

;Giovanni Battista Bononcini

''Griselda'' — Lauris Elms (Griselda), Joan Sutherland (Ernesto), Monica Sinclair (Gualtiero), Margreta Elkins (Almirena), Spiro Malas (Rambaldo), Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Richard Bonynge, recorded 1967. Decca 448 977-2 (coupled with ''Montezuma'')

;Gaetano Donizetti

''La fille du régiment'' — Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti (Tonio), Spiro Malas (Sulpice); Richard Bonynge

''L'elisir d'amore'' — Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, Spiro Malas, Maria Casula; Richard Bonynge

;Gioachino Rossini

''Semiramide'' — Joan Sutherland (Semiramide), John Serge (Idreno), Joseph Rouleau (Assur), Spiro Malas (Oroe), Patricia Clark (Azema), Leslie Fyson (Mitrane), Michael Langdon (Spectre of Nino), Marilyn Horne (Arsace), London Symphony Orchestra, Richard Bonynge. Decca 425 481-2, recorded in 1966.

References

External links

Barnard College, Columbia University biography

Category:1933 births Category:Living people Category:American opera singers Category:Operatic bass-baritones Category:American musical theatre actors Category:American television actors Category:Manhattan School of Music alumni Category:Musicians from Baltimore, Maryland Category:Winners of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions Category:Actors from Maryland

fr:Spiro Malas