in lincoln center almost the world's greatest musical events another program of new york philharmonic young people's concert under the musical direction of leonard berns actually learned but i like to think we must be doing something right because well because it's our tenth season and to add to the festivities this is also the first season in which all our programs will be seen on television in color which is why i've got this mukesh lee colorful tie and that brings us to our subject what is a mode well for one thing musical modes have nothing to do with neck ties or dresses or even with fashions of a musical kind modes or simply scales it's not perhaps those very scales you practice on your piano there are other special scales and i wouldn't have dreamed of bothering you with them except for an incident that happened a few months ago my fourteen year old daughter jamie happened to ask me one day why a certain beatles song had such funny harmony she couldn't seem to find the right chords for it on her guitar and i began to explain to her that the song modal that is it was based on what is called a mode and i went on to show her the chords that came from that mode and she got so excited she wanted to know more and more about it so finally she said well why not tell all this on the young people's program nobody ever heard of modes well i thought jamie is just a natural music lover with the usual weekly piano lesson and if she finds this material fascinating why shouldn't you so here goes and you can blame it all on ja welcome once again to the radical imagination i'm your host jim verraros i'm a sociologist who's taught at john jay college and yeshiva university here in new york one of the key questions we discuss on the show and ask people about is where and how they develop their radical imagination the answers are as wide in diverse as the people we've had on the show and as broad indifferent as the people who listen to it a few things stand out though one's radical imagination seems to be a passion that comes out of the love and creative hunger to express and know more more about the world more about a particular subject more about people more about life for me it began to surface as a child through music i was extraordinarily fortunate to have a mother who was an artist and a pianist music was always in the house while my mother painted while i played throughout the day anything much of music was classical but all kinds of music from all corners of the world were played and heard and for five years of the old i begged my mother to give me piano lessons and she said happily yes she didn't need to force me it was a natural progression from the joy i experience as a child listening and taking in the beautiful intriguing sounds i heard from her own playing the radio and our stereo and when i was eleven a program began to air on television called young people's concerts with the new york philharmonic the narrator  mesmerizing figure you could take your eyes off you couldn't take your eyes off him you could close your ears mind our heart to it every new york city public school kid was watching it it was a rite of passage like going to see the grand blue whale model of the american museum of natural history or a school field trip to the haydn planetarium or rooting for the yankees or dodgers or giant maestro was leonard bernstein and my own radical magination soared to new heights i never knew was in me to now have on the show the eldest daughter of maestro bernstein sixty years after that first young people's concert is beyond my wildest and fondest imagination she's a writer narrator broadcaster and filmmaker and the author of a critically acclaimed book called famous father girl a of growing up bernstein we see her famous father so a daughter's eyes a loving and unsettling portrait welcome jamie jamie bernstein it was your fault right that's what your father said about the most the most the most thing but welcome again to the radical magination thank you so mighty being here and tell us about the young people's concerts and this clip we just seen about the mode and blame it on jamie well i'll tell you that my memory of this mood business is different from what my father described my memory is that it was after one of the young people's concerts and my brother and i had been there with our dad all day long watching them put the whole show together which was one of our favorite things to do it's very interesting to watch the whole show being put together and we all got in the car with our dad and he immediately turned on the radio like he always did and he would say let's catch up and put on the pop station because he loved the beatles and motown and the rolling stones and so we listened to all that pop music to get but rather quietly and turn on the classical faces know the pops of the stage and your rock well i was maniac you were ok the beatles were the most important thing in the world to me in those days so it happened that the song by the kinks you really got me tame on the radio that i'm one of our do you know what a mode is no my brother and i did not of course so he proceeded to start explaining modes to us right there in the car on the way to connecticut and when we got to the house he took us three over to the piano and then leisure brother and sister and me as guinea pigs for a lot of his young people's concert scripts and ideas he would try things out on us so that's how i recall it all happening but anyway you are correct that the young people concerts had this tremendous impact on more than one generation of viewers and in new york city of course it was even more memorable for everybody because it was as you said the hometown team you know the new but the whole country got to tune in and learn about classical music through the new york philharmonic and my father and his amazing scripts that he wrote himself and his amazing ability to seem to jump right out of the t v screen and be right there with you so you talk about the radical imagination my father had that radical imagination just to the max he had that that  russia's curiosity not just about music but about everything literature and history and science and math and art and anything you could think of he was just you know devoured by curiosity and then the thing was the minute he learned about anything that he was excited about he had to turn right around and share it with somebody else and that's why he was such an effective teacher because you could feel his excitement  jumping out at you as if you were tugging you on the sleeve listen to this we feel his presence here at this moment where did he get this credible energy this life force what about it was background i mean i think we have to just say that it was kind of piece of magic and an accident of fate and d n a i don't know because his family his father and mother were rather well i mean his father had a burning curiosity but about only one thing and that was the talmud my grandfather sam was a tell magick scholar in every spare moment that he had in his life but he was actually by day he was a businessman and you know he is the classic immigrant success story he escaped the poor grooms from russia in russia ukraine came over without a ko pack in his pocket got here and struggled along and found distant relatives and managed to kind of strive and scramble and eventually was able to start his very own hair and beauty supply business in boston the samuel j bernstein here company in boston it's to be able to hand over his successful hair and beauty supply business to his eldest son leonard to run yeah that was the absolute capper on his successful immigrant experience so we need to bring that out to this day today as we have a president who is sending fifty two hundred not reserve active military troops to our southern border basically to confront if you will thousands of desperately poor people coming to our southern border mainly women and children so i mean that has to be emphasized again with you know your your own grandfathers experience coming here and how all of us well i think we can safely say that most of us would not be here if our current president were to actually be able to enact this change in the laws which he's not able to do with the stroke of his pen as he wished he could we would all have to leave because if he had his way anyone who was born here whose parents weren't born here would have to be injected it's so  getting back to to the political scene right but anyway so yes you had a very different childhood experience from my dad you were encouraged in your artistry whereas my dad was actively discouraged by his father minutes and fiddler on the roof and so there you know they would give him a bowl of cabbage soup and a couple of callings and see you later and then he would get back on the road interest to the next village so you call that a living right i mean at you know so of course my grandfather's experience of what a musician was meant that he was certainly not going to encourage his son to be a musician he sweat to pay for his piano lessons and so what my father taught other kids in the neighborhood how to play the piano and made his money that way and that was how he paid for the piano lessons so many years later when the he was twenty five years old and my father had this cinderella like overnight success by having to take over conducting the new york philharmonic at the last minute and it was a national radio broadcast and he became famous overnight some journalist got wind of this story about my grandfather and he confronted my grandfather sam and said is it true that you wouldn't pay for your son's piano lesson yeah yeah and sam bernstein famously replied well how was i supposed to know he turn out to be leonard bernstein rather it's a true story is that that's a lot to deal with their ok yes a lot to do but sometimes when something is being kept away from you when you really want it it makes you want it more so maybe it actually ended up you know giving my father even more determination to be a musician precisely because his father was trying to prevent him when he study well he well he had a he had piano lessons as a kid right and then he went to harvard and had a regular liberal arts education right and then after that he spent two years at curtis institute of music in philadelphia and that concluded his music education at curtis he was studying piano and conducting not composing he actually never officially studied composition but he had composing mentors and probably the most important one of all was his very close friend and mentor aaron copeland koval so conducting came easy easier than composing oh i don't know i mean i think he had a aptitude for both of for both but i think in a way composing was harder because it was lonelier and the thing my father hated most of all in this world next to injustice was solitude he really didn't like to be alone and so composing was hard and lonely work for him that's why i think he enjoyed writing broadway shows so much and ballets and operas and anything that involved collaboration because that way  and and and joining with other people in join that well he was all about people as well but as he would be the first to say he loved people and he loved connecting and he knew nick cave and he loved your family he loved you i mean right but yeah and you've got this incredible book where you are to show us over and over again with that love that love is expressed it's it's not at all all times conventional how would you describe  growing up in that well i guess you're right that it wasn't conventional and you know every family has its ups and downs of course and in our family because my father was such a luminary i guess everything was just written a little brighter a little larger but they're not all the same essential ingredients that most families have you know and i credit our mother family someone to negative who came from gina in south america i credit her with creating the stability and the delicious happy warm environment that kept our family so happy and healthy my father you know was so all over the place his energy was after all i mean he's the conductor he's the maestro he he's supposedly he's the guy he was on my arm yeah so he did he carry that over into the family life or did  well i mean you know this is a guy who couldn't stop teaching who couldn't stop communicating and so he was like this all the time even at home like the thing with the modes you know he just had to explain  had to go to the piano and share and he was only when he was tell mother a tradition there right now it was very much in the old helmeted tradition and his grandfather was like that to his joke with his brother and sister was there a father sam if you were at the dinner table with sam and you said sam could you please pass the salt sam would say funny thing about salt you know lots wife in the bible and then he'd be off on some story and so they all made fun of sam for being that way but actually my father was even more that way than sam was with no matter what the topic was it would it would set him off so my sister nina always says you had to be really careful about what question you asked our father because if it was too juicy a question the answer was going to be an hour long and that's just the way our dad was and and your mom also created you have create this environment of this this so long on this long type of arms you had and but the thing she had that he did not have was a fantastic i for design and a kind of genius for making an environment delicious and that's the thing that she did in our house and that's why everybody always wanted to come over our house because it was fun there it was warm and inviting the furniture and the decor and the art and everything was beautiful but not that we had a cook who was from south america usually from chile and so we had all this delicious food everybody wanted to come to our house and they did and such people because my parents were at the epicenter of this amazing cultural environment in new york city in the middle of the twentieth century where there was just so much going on and people were amazing and there they all over showing up at our house and of course i was just a little kid i didn't know that mike nichols and richard avedon and steve sondheim world incredible people i just thought they were my parents friends and i like them a lot but it was only later that i realized that they were luminaries unto themselves setting the tone for an entire country and culture and here you know father in the middle of this as well and you become part of this this makes as well a lot of or combination well at first it was just fun there was no us pressure as i say you know our family was just our family you when you're a kid you have nothing to compare it to it's just your personal home environment and  it does we yeah and we had all these wonderful people around all the time and they were fun and they were hilarious and there was music all the time and there were you know charades and joke telling and and reciting of poetry and word games and so it was a fantastic environment to grow up and for a long time and then things got more complicated later later meaning what time well i will tell you i when i look back at my childhood there was a day when the shadows fell and that day was november twenty second one thousand nine hundred sixty three the day j f k was assassinated before that day i can't really say i ever saw my parents cry or any grown ups cry you know it was all kind of a sort of happy von loving environment with with you know with a lot of warmth and energy and in all that good stuff which certainly didn't go away entirely but as an absolute that was the day when i realized that being a grown up was more complicated than i thought it was the end of innocence in the vins yeah we're going to show a clip in a little bit  was that's a lot of fun yeah and you know a lot of fun it took a lot of time away from his composing he always complained but when you see that you can see why you had to keep going back and doing that oh yeah i mean absolutely i mean i can't imagine how much fun he must have been having there and just living life to the motions you know i think i always think that it's so perfect that that job is called being a conductor because it really is like an electrical circuit where the energy flows from the orchestra to the audience through the conductor in the circuit absolutely is a really a growing up with that and you can't and if i was you know musical myself as are my brother and sister but it was it was always a conflict for me comparisons are odious and i could see that you know he was at a level of musicianship that i could not hope to begin to approach and yet and yet and yet i loved making music myself and i wrote songs on piano and guitar and i just couldn't let it go so i didn't pursue it for quite a few years i moved out to l a to to get my record deal as a singer songwriter and i shopped my tapes around as we used to do back in the day and  support of of that wasn't he was supportive but i do think that there was a kind of unspoken understanding that you know well whatever you do as a musician is certainly not going to be at the level of what i'm doing over here he never said such a thing but right i've felt it i think anyway i've you know beat my head against that for many years and then finally set it aside and and had my family raised my family and stood ok and you've written this terrific book well and what the book is is quite a bit of of the book is about how i finally made my peace with music because i did struggle over it and you know i love music and i loved making music but i was always kind of in agony and the image that i use in the book is that i had one foot on the gas and the other foot on the brake at the same time so i so my energy was always being blocked by my self and it wasn't really until i stopped making music with my own body that i got calmer and out of my own way and luckily i stumbled upon this very satisfactory solution compromise which was to talk about music to write about music and so what i do is i now write concerts not unlike my father's young people's concerts except i don't do the conducting part but i do the talking for talking and the writing part let's get back to in just a minute because as you were talking about the accelerator in the break here tell us about this this excerpt you have in the book where you are going out with your father  outgoing personality that is just exuberant and is just out there just throwing themselves into the world so we were actually at the ski resort to vail colorado back when it was first beginning right in the sixty's and there was a disco there so we all went with our friends that we were staying with my father my brother and myself were on this trip and we all went to casino vale it was called if memory serves to dance with him and then for some reason everybody else in the disco made a circle around us and started clapping in rhythm to us dancing so i found myself stuck in the middle of the circle dancing with my father at the age of fourteen when these things are very embarrassing and when it got really embarrassing was when my father got down on his knees and took out his handkerchief and started twirling it over as head and what could i do but sort of dance around him in a little circle and everybody's clapping and screaming and it was the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me ever really so up to that moment in that moment so he was showing a sort of  also on comfortable for me not for him not for him but it was just the thing you might do i mean it was you know for him it was just his way of being at the center of attention in a exuberant way and he was loving the music and loving the moment and probably very enjoying sharing it with his poor mortified daughter so he didn't he meant no harm he meant no harm ok are there other examples where you felt that as  and this is what happens in a family when one of the family members is larger than life you as a family and as individual individual members of the family have to figure out a way to navigate and is  life force that he was to that became at times also i mean we had food fights in restaurants i mean and worse ok but the point is it is a larger than life figure that one comes to grips with and on that tradition young people's concert it does carry on that tradition and it turns out that if i inherited anything from my dad it's this love communicating you know i have that a lot myself and so in the show here i really enjoy getting up especially in front of an audience of young people you know and telling them about music and i do this all over the place not just about my dad i talk about all kinds of composers and musical topics and i love doing it i write the script myself i research the topic then i squeeze all that information down into a user friendly just like you have just like you're dead in this like my dad i just don't do the music part you don't write and that works very well for me because it still keeps me in the world of music it means that i'm with musicians i'm at orchestra rehearsals i'm hanging out afterwards mainly well i'll give you an example yeah well there's a wonderful young orchestra in miami beach called the new world symphony that was started by michael tilson thomas and it's kind of an orchestral academy and these are very young musicians fresh out of conservatory so it's like a farm team for professional orchestras and a lot of them are picked off by the scouts and become members of the professional orchestras all around the country so they're really good musicians and they're just starting out so the atmosphere down there is fantastic and i was invited to do two concerts a year that were just an hour long like the young people's concerts but for adult audiences and sometimes i would choose  subject and sometimes sometimes they would so it could be anything from i had one called romeo's and juliet's where i talked about different orchestral pieces that were inspired by romeo and juliet so is the fantastic fantasy by tchaikovsky which is the big that has that big loved tune that we all know to you right right and then there's a really good perkoff e f ballet of romeo and juliet that has then task music and there was also of course west side story which was composed by my dad and is inspired is based on romeo and juliet it tells the same story except modernized with street gangs in new york city so we put in some of that music too so that's just one example of a concert i did down there i did one about stravinsky and i did one about i did one about russian music and i did one have you have you set aside a lecture are many on your father's will i give many talks about my dad's music and i generally do one about websites or many in fact  is that three notes are the key to the entire west side story score and they are the first three notes of the show but i don't know which is also the jets whistle it's how the gang signals to each othe bowie the cool number right and so it's that those three know if you find them all over the score in all these different transfiguration and permutations just like beethoven took pop up and used that all the way through the fifth symphony so my father took classical music building blocks and used them in a broadway score and the thing that's so cool about those three notes is that that weird note in the middle bomba it's called a tr  is neither fish nor fowl used to be called the devil's interval it's considered like weird and maybe a little wicked or something back in the day so the weirdness of that tr i got you started look i'm back whatever it was well i'll tell you the wonderful thing about west side story for dad is that it was one of his most magnificent ways of using music to try and make the world a better place which is something that he did all his life he was as much an activist as he was an artist and when he could do both at the same time that's when he was most fulfilled so in one side story this is you know one of the ultimate tellings of how love tries to triumph over hatred and violence and intolerance and you know all these in the immigrant experience only essentially little that i am very sorry to say are with us and it was after the show we did hear from months ago that he said get a hold of well his way of having reimagine west side story for his for his latin american orchestra you know it's the greatest thing ever i think i think you'd be out in the streets making a racket you know putting on concerts to raise money for you know the the people who lost their homes in puerto rico last year  i actually went to a concert performance of west side story in philadelphia last year and when and when they got to this line nobody knows in the conductor stopped the music dead and there was this gigantic silence and the whole audience went and then people started applauding it was such a dramatic moment so was side story can still tell our modern stories for us today and absolutely now during the sixty's and seventy's with the political turmoil there was this movement also too i mean a lot of stuff was going on the radical politics radical chic i brought that i just want to bring up a little bit of the political activism so much was was being talked about there are black panthers and lords white radicals s d s bequests of all sorts trying to mold and build a ra we've had we've had i was involved in some of those efforts colombia as a graduate student we've had students here we've had students we've had mark run on the on the show a number of other people progressive in my family's history to talk about the briefly briefly sure it was my mother's effort my father had nothing to do with this with this event it was my mother who was very involved with the committee for public justice which was a subsidiary of of a large organization that was doing a lot of work at the time for social justice and so she was encouraged to hold a fundraiser for to raise money to help the families of these incarcerated black panther members who were waiting for their trial and they had been arrested on these trumped up  charges of supposedly you know planning to blow up bloomingdale's or it was all complete nonsense and the entire thing was thrown out by the judge on the first day of the trial but meanwhile they're stuck in jail waiting for this trial to come around and how are the families going to subsist so my mother was trying to raise some money to help the families you know stay fed and clothed get the kids to school in the you know just stay alive many ways she could do on her own so this there was no press in to this event but two members of the press sneaked in and that's where all the trouble began and my father was across town rehearsing at lincoln center and he arrived at this event in the middle of it and of course the minute he walked into a room all eyes turned on him and the temperature in the room changed he was one of those people so when these two journalists wrote about this incident later on one in the new york times and the other in new york magazine it was all about my father and it is participation in this event and it became all about it as if it was something that he had invented and then the blowback began and it was mainly tom wolfe's piece right that was first in new york magazine and was called that party at lenny's was not a party was a fundraising event with refreshments but never mind about that right and then later on that essay was incorporated into a book that was called radical chic and mel mowing the flack catcher is which was a different essay and these two essays were put into one book so that's when the misunderstanding was cemented and jewish people were really angry at my father because the black panthers were considered to be and he zionist and so then there were picketers outside our building the jewish defense league was picketing for a long time in front of our building and it was only in the one nine hundred eighty s when my father saw his f b i file through the freedom of information act only then did he discover that they were friends and family members who were furious at my mother for having had that well fundraiser and so she she caught a lot of flac you know and it was less hard on my father because he could leave new york and go conduct in europe and sort of escape the situation but my mother was firmly stuck in the whole thing and it really took it out of all that was part of the incredible polarization the time and was so much he would be around today and i know he would be joining in so many of the movements poor people's campaign and some of the other movements are going on so many and speaking out also much more humanely and rationally about what's going on in the middle east and israel palestine and so on but let's we've only got a couple more minutes here and this is just been a total delight and i know for myself this book has is a very important accomplishment where the title came from please do in the last oh in it we have in second grade my classmate lisa used to tease me and her nickname for me to tease me was famous father girl so i decided to use that for my title because i like you because it's a little bit rude it kind of tweaks your nose well you're in a famous father and you are famous you touched us all tremendously in this thank you show so thank you so much thanks for having me on the program thank you thank you again so much and thank you all for watching the radical magination this week we're going to leave you with a couple of excerpts from west side story was each of red arrows for the what wasn't together just sort of covered by the hard num when we go