Bernstein’s relationship with Aaron Copland was one of the most significant of his life. Starting with their first meeting in 1937, this chapter considers Copland’s musical influence on Bernstein as an emerging composer and the support and opportunities Copland provided during Bernstein’s formative years. It then goes on to explore the importance of Bernstein’s Copland advocacy on the conducting podium, with reference to major commissions, concerts, and recordings. Drawing on both their public and private comments and correspondence, the changing nature of their relationship and views on each other’s activities are traced, resulting in a shared portrait of more than five decades of friendship and musical connections.

Morgan James Luker examines tango through the early recorded sound industry, using archival recordings of tango artist Ángel Villoldo (1861–1919). Luker shows the reader how to move from the narrative-driven mode of “causal listening” to the object-driven mode of “matrix listening,” and so view individual recorded sound objects as things with agency. He illuminates our understanding of Villoldo as a case study.

Ethnomusicologist Yuiko Asaba provides a solid global view of tango. She examines tango’s transnational dynamics with historical and ethnographic approaches, and embraces themes of affect and transculturality between Japan and Argentina.

The atmosphere of innovation and experimentation in the 1960s was not lost on Leonard Bernstein. His advocacy for the Mahler symphonies, for instance, was highly influential to a generation of composers excited by Mahler’s stylistic heterogeneity. Indeed, one of the best-known examples, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia, was dedicated to Bernstein and a New York Philharmonic commission. Bernstein also collaborated with two other mavericks of that decade: the pianist Glenn Gould and the composer John Cage. With the former, Bernstein led a much-understood but controversial performance of the Brahms first piano concerto; with the latter, he created a programme with the Philharmonic about what he called aleatoric music, including a performance of Cage’s indeterminate work Atlas Eclipticalis. These encounters were of immense importance to all three artists.

Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins shared mutual desires to innovate and create in their individual fields and to create truly ‘American’ art of the twentieth century. Their collaborations for ballet (Fancy Free, On the Town, Facsimile, Age of Anxiety, Dybbuk) and musical theatre and film (West Side Story) propelled each into defining their specific style and artistic voices. Their aim to synthesize classical, symphonic aesthetics with rhythms and movements of Black and Latinx vernacular dance and music; their mutual interest in translating character, intention, emotion, mood, and narrative circumstances through non-textual mediums; and their active integration of music and movement in the creative process cinched their artistic connection. Even after the two went their separate ways, their legacies are forever entwined.

This chapter explores Leonard Bernstein’s work as pianist-conductor, including early influences that shaped Bernstein’s choice to conduct while playing, preferred repertoire (Mozart, Beethoven, Ravel and Gershwin), and reception by audience, and critics. Bernstein’s technique as conductor-pianist is analysed through audio and video recordings, as well as through the study of Bernstein’s annotated scores from the New York Philharmonic Archives. A brief history of conducting from the piano serves to contextualize this notable aspect of Bernstein’s career. Particular attention is given to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which was among Bernstein’s most frequently performed pieces while leading the orchestra from the piano. An analysis of three different recorded performances of Bernstein’s performance of the Rhapsody – two audio recordings and one televised broadcast – provide insight into significant moments (and challenges) for Bernstein as pianist-conductor, as well as key interpretive changes in his performance over time.

Leonard Bernstein stated in 1977, ‘The work I have been writing all my life is about … the crisis of our century, a crisis of faith’. In the decade between 1961 and 1971, he completed just three works, all choral-orchestral: ‘Kaddish’ (Symphony No. 3), Chichester Psalms, and Mass. This chapter views these works through the lens of Bernstein’s intense concern with a crisis of faith, at once societal and personal, philosophical and musical. In its reading of the scores, it seeks a deeper understanding of the music (including for practical performance), and of Bernstein’s propositions in theological as well as musical terms – concluding that his process is not merely one of presenting crises, but also one working to revise and reinvigorate larger faith and musical structures, as we see most spectacularly in Mass’s ritual of crisis and reaffirmation.

Few would argue the premise that Leonard Bernstein’s music sounds prototypically American. Most of his works include numerous passages that would only have been written by someone from the United States, especially one active from the 1940s to the 1980s. His frequent cultivation of musical tropes associated with various types of jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rock, Latin music, and concert music by the likes of Aaron Copland help make Bernstein’s interest in an American sound perhaps the single most significant factor that defines his musical style. This chapter considers how that style developed in terms of when and how he discovered and incorporated major American musical styles. The musical influences blend with other inspirations from Jewish music and Western concert music to render Bernstein one of the most eclectic composers of his generation.

Sociologist and tango dancer Kathy Davis provides an ethnographic exploration of passion in tango dancers, and she illustrates how such passion is embodied, attached to strongly felt emotions, and implicated in biographical transformations. She argues that tango dancing offers a perfect site for understanding the importance of passion in ordinary people’s everyday lives, gender relations in late modernity, and the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational encounters in a globalizing world.

Omar García Brunelli provides a solid historical overview of tango music, dance, and poetry. He first broadly lays out tango’s African, European, Argentine, and Uruguayan origins in the Río de la Plata region of South America, then focuses on the musical changes that took place through time. In doing so, García Brunelli highlights important contributors from tango’s guardia vieja (Old Guard), guardia nueva (New Guard), and Golden Age; discusses Piazzolla’s nuevo tango (New Tango); and brings his overview up to today by describing active contemporary tango musicians.

Film scholar Rielle Navitski applies her discipline’s lens to tango and Argentine culture. She provides an overview of tango’s intersections with film; analyzes how tango’s affective qualities and transnational wanderings have shaped a long and productive pas de deux with the cinema; shows the influence of each in a historical context; and raises broader questions of cultural exchange and hegemony.

This chapter examines Bernstein’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union. Born four years before the creation of the Soviet Union and dying eleven months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his life story, including his rise to global prominence, paralleled the history of the Soviet republics. As an American of Ukrainian heritage, the composer had personal ties to the region. I examine these family connections and their complexities; his lifelong interest in Russian classical music; his period of attraction to Communism as an ideology, its consequences, and his statements in support of US–Soviet peace; and his 1960 cultural-diplomacy-related tour of the USSR with the New York Philharmonic. Ultimately, I argue that the United States’ relationship with the USSR had a profound impact not only on his family life and conducting career, but also on his attitudes to music-stylistic choices.