Musical Biography: Who is Leonard Bernstein?
Bernstein—or "Lenny," as he was often affectionately called—was an extravagantly gifted musician with a common touch.
Author: Carol J. Oja
Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University and on the faculty of Harvard’s graduate program in American Studies. Her most recent book, Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (2014), won the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. Her Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music and an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. Other books include Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds; American Music Recordings: A Discography of 20th-Century U.S. Composers; Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000 (edited together with Felix Meyer, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne Shreffler); and Aaron Copland and his World (edited with Judith Tick). Oja has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, the National Humanities Center, NEH, and the Mellon Faculty Fellows Program at Harvard. She is past-president of the Society for American Music and has twice chaired the Pulitzer Prize committee in music. She is currently at work on a book about Marian Anderson and the racial desegregation of classical music performance.
