What effect does music have on our inner world? And how does a composer’s psychology manifest in their work? Jamie Bernstein, AB ’74, Samuel Wong, MD ’88, and Patrick Whelan, HMS part-time lecturer on pediatrics, explored these questions on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 Norton Lectures in Poetry.
These six lectures, delivered by Jamie’s father, the late composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, AB ’39, serve as the focus of Whelan’s Harvard Extension School course, Music and the Mind, about the neuroscience and evolutionary origins of human musicality.
This discussion took place prior to the premiere of the Oscar-nominated film Maestro, which depicts the complicated love story between Leonard Bernstein and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre.
