After years of studying piano as a young woman in her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson curated her music book, a common practice at the time. Now part of the Dickinson Collection in the Houghton Library of Harvard University, this bound volume of 107 pieces of published sheet music includes the poet’s favorite instrumental piano music and vocal music, ranging from theme and variation sets to vernacular music, which was also enjoyed by the family’s servants.

Offering a fresh historical perspective on a poetic voice that has become canonical in American literature, this original study brings this artifact to life, documenting Dickinson’s early years of musical study through the time her music was bound in the early 1850s, which tellingly coincided with the writing of her first poems. Using Dickinson’s letters and poems alongside newspapers and other archival sources, George Boziwick explores the various composers, music sellers, and publishers behind this music and Dickinson’s attendance at performances, presenting new insights into the multiple layers of meaning that music held for her.

“A summation of his beliefs about music as he looked into the final quarter of the 20th century...Bernstein’s talks still seem surprisingly fresh. But words were nearly as much Bernstein’s métier as music.”—New York Times

Six in-depth lessons on the language of music from the legendary, Grammy Award–winning conductor.

The varied forms of Leonard Bernstein’s musical creativity have been recognized and enjoyed by millions. These lectures, a special monument in Bernstein's legacy, also make fascinating reading. “Nobody anywhere presents this material so warmly, so sincerely, so skillfully,” says the composer Virgil Thomson. “As musical mind-openers they are first class; as pedagogy they are matchless.”

Bernstein considers genres ranging from folk and pop to Hindu ragas, along with symphonic works from Mozart and Ravel to Ives and Copland. Drawing on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory, he suggests that each has roots in a “worldwide, inborn musical grammar,” and explores how this grammar generates such a staggeringly diverse array of musical dialects. He also mines his own experience as a master composer and conductor to delve beneath music’s aesthetic surface, discovering the hidden acoustic transformations that create unconscious resonance for listeners. Finally, examining twentieth-century crises in the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Bernstein discovers a new iteration of the deep poetry of musical expression—finding, even in the throes of experimentalism, echoes of all that had come before.

Armed with nearly one hundred notated examples and abundant charisma, Bernstein shows here that, in addition to being a consummate musical prodigy, he was also a master teacher. These talks remain among the composer’s greatest achievements.