Bernstein, A Simple Song

Simplicity is a virtue, the virtue of removing everything extraneous to something in order to reveal its true essence. After enduring the hoopla of the Super Bowl this week, I’m convinced it is mostly a forgotten virtue.

I remember a lecture I attended years ago in graduate school given by the American musicologist Richard Crawford. Actually, the only thing I remember was his discussion of simplicity and how the aesthetics of Americans tend in the opposite direction. We like bigness, not necessarily complexity. We want 50 bands on the field at halftime no matter how hopelessly muddled the sound becomes. (Oh, that we still had marching bands at halftime!) Crawford described the version of Battle Hymn of the Republic that you no doubt know, with its fanfares, modulating episodes, 100-piece orchestra, multiple choirs, and kitchen sink. If Crawford gave that lecture today, surely the Super Bowl would provide an even better (bigger?) example.

Leonard Bernstein’s “A Simple Song” appears in his 1971 Mass, aptly described as “a theater piece in the form of a Mass.” Bernstein intersperses dances and additional music with the Christian liturgy. We don’t need to get into the theology of Bernstein’s Mass. That could be a topic for something other than a performance pick. But the Mass is not a simple work. In fact, it includes much of the bigness and hoopla we just described: eclectic styles, off-stage choirs, and marching bands in the theater aisles.

Let’s not confuse simplicity with a lack of complexity. Bach fugues and Mozart finales are complex, but their complexity is not extraneous to their essence.

“A Simple Song” nicely demonstrates simplicity and stresses the line: “God is the simplest of all.” This is not a novel statement by Bernstein, but one that has occupied theologians over the ages. I will leave it to you to dig further into the theology, if you are so inclined, and to consider whether the Mass as a whole has the virtue of simplicity.

Bernstein had a gift for distilling the complexities of music into simple terms for children in his Young People’s Concerts that began in 1958. Thomas Hampson also does significant work in music education, in particular by championing the genre of American song.