The Leonard Bernstein Office and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music co-present MASS at 50, a livestream panel discussion, on January 10, 2022

The Leonard Bernstein Office and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music co-present MASS at 50, a livestream panel discussion, on January 10, 2022 at 3pm EST

Moderator Jamie Bernstein will join panelists Steven Schwartz, Marin Alsop, Wayne Marshall, John Mauceri, Carol Oja, Paulo Szot, and Douglas Webster

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The Leonard Bernstein Office and Indiana University (IU) Jacobs School of Music will co-present MASS at 50, a livestream panel discussion, on January 10, 2022 at 3pm EST. Registration is free and open to the public through the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music website.

Offering a range of perspectives about its history and its continuing impact, the panelists include Stephen Schwartz, lyricist, with Bernstein, for MASS; conductor Marin Alsop, frequent conductor of MASS, including the recent Ravinia production; Paulo Szot, baritone, Celebrant in the recent Ravinia production; baritone Douglas Webster, has been involved with over twenty productions of MASS;  professor Carol Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University; conductor John Mauceri, frequent conductor of MASS, including first European performance and the tenth anniversary production at the Kennedy Center; and conductor Wayne Marshall, frequent conductor of MASS in Europe.

Leonard Bernstein’s daughter Jamie Bernstein will moderate the panel, which will feature a conversation around MASS’s history, musical ideas, controversial themes, and continuing legacy and impact on society. She remarked: “It was one of the privileges of my childhood to witness MASS coming into existence, bar by bar. I can’t wait to hear what all our panelists will have to say.”  The 60-minute conversation will be followed by a Q&A from the audience.

Host Philip Ponella, Wennerstrom-Phillips Music Library Director and Chief Digital Officer at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, will welcome the webinar audience and introduce the panel moderator. He said of this collaboration: “We are thrilled to be working together with the Leonard Bernstein Office to celebrate Bernstein’s groundbreaking composition, MASS. Leonard Bernstein shared a long and creative history with IU. During his residency here in the early 1980s, he workshopped his final opera, A Quiet Place, and, after he passed away, the archival treasures of his composition studio found a new home here at Jacobs. Over the decades, our students have performed most of Bernstein’s works, including MASS (three productions), West Side Story, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Candide, On the Town, and Wonderful Town. In 1999, IU held a weeklong symposium for his 80th birthday celebration. Through this webinar, IU continues to honor Leonard Bernstein’s legacy and share his commitment to the transformative power and joy of music to our students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community."

Stephen Schwartz said: "Working with Leonard Bernstein on MASS was one of the most exciting experiences of my professional life, and I learned so much from my collaboration with him.  I am delighted with how surprisingly well the piece has aged, and I continue to be proud of having been able to contribute to it." 

About MASS at 50
Leonard Bernstein’s visionary theatre piece, MASS, celebrated its 50^th birthday on September 9, 2021. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to inaugurate the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, MASS has gained in power and immediacy over the ensuing decades. MASS was groundbreaking in many significant ways. The piece called for a pit orchestra, two choruses, a boys’ choir, a Broadway-flavored “Street Chorus,” the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, a marching band, a rock band – and the work’s protagonist, the Celebrant. MASS truly contains multitudes. Bernstein’s score combines elements of musical theater, jazz, gospel, folk, and rock music, while also employing a rich symphonic palette. All of this was happening in the mid-20^th century, when “serious” composers wrote strictly in the 12-tone idiom.

Bernstein collaborated with Broadway composer Stephen Schwartz on the English text. (The adult choruses sing the traditional Latin liturgy.) Sometimes anguished, sometimes wry, the lyrics demand answers to all of mankind’s most searching questions about existence and faith. The piece builds to a shattering breakdown, followed by a healing finale. 

Reactions to the premiere of MASS were nothing short of seismic – especially in the Catholic community. Some cities, under pressure from their local diocese, even cancelled planned performances. Other prominent members of the clergy, meanwhile, were declaring their ardent support for the piece. (It was eventually performed at the Vatican.) Some music critics raised an eyebrow over Bernstein’s mixing of genres, while others found the work to be inspired and prescient. Live audiences were transported by the experience of sharing such an intense communal journey. The recording became a cult favorite.

Five decades later, MASS is no longer seen as controversial, but as a visionary work of its time that remains urgently relevant. Writer Ed Seckerson reflected on MASS’s impact after half a century: “Put simply, no other work of Bernstein’s encapsulates exactly who he was as a man or as a musician; no other work display’s his genius, his intellect, his musical virtuosity and innate theatricality quite like MASS.”

About the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
As one of the most comprehensive and acclaimed institutions for the study of music, the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music plays a key role in educating performers, scholars, and music educators who influence music performance and education around the globe. The almost 1,600 students who study at the Jacobs School of Music benefit from the intensity and focus of a conservatory combined with the broad academic offerings of a major university. 

The essence of a great music school is its faculty, and the more than 170 full-time faculty members in residence at the IU Jacobs School of Music include performers, scholars, and teachers of international renown. In addition, many top musicians and scholars come to the school each year to give master classes and guest lectures or to serve as visiting artistic directors, conductors, and faculty.

About Steven Schwartz
Stephen Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics for the current Broadway hit Wicked, and has also contributed music and/or lyrics to MASS, Godspell, Pippin, The Magic Show, The Baker’s Wife, Working (which he also adapted and directed), Rags, and Children of Eden.  He has also worked in film, collaborating with Alan Menken on the songs for Disney’s Enchanted as well as the animated features Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and writing the songs for the DreamWorks animated feature The Prince of Egypt, a stage adaptation of which is about to re-open in London's West End.  His opera, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, was produced at Opera Santa Barbara and New York City Opera. A book about his career, “Defying Gravity,” has been released by Applause Books. Mr. Schwartz has been inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and has been given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Awards include three Academy Awards, four Grammy Awards, and the Isabelle Stevenson special Tony Award.

About Marin Alsop
One of the foremost conductors of our time, Marin Alsop represents a powerful and inspiring voice. The first woman to serve as the head of a major orchestra in the U.S., South America, Austria and Britain, she is the first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She holds positions as Chief Conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, first Music Director of the University of Maryland’s National Orchestral Institute Festival, Conductor of Honour of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and Chief Conductor and Curator of Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, where she conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s summer residencies. Later this year, after an outstanding 14-year tenure as its Music Director, she assumes the title of Music Director Laureate and OrchKids Founder of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. She is also the founder of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, which promotes and nurtures the careers of fellow female conductors. 

About Wayne Marshall
British conductor, organist and pianist Wayne Marshall is world-renowned for his musicianship and versatility on the podium and at the keyboard. He served as Chief Conductor of WDR Funkhaus Orchestra Cologne 2014–2020, became Principal Guest Conductor of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi in 2007 and is a celebrated interpreter of Gershwin, Bernstein and other 20th century composers.  Throughout 2018, he played a key role in leading the Bernstein centennial celebrations. Highlights included Bernstein’s MASS with Orchestre de Paris at the Philharmonie de Paris and Symphony No. 3: Kaddish with Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse later in the year. He also made his debut with Zurich Philharmonie in an all-Bernstein program and conducted the rarely-performed White House Cantata in Utrecht with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also worked with the Munich Rundfunkorchester at the Prinzregententheater and Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, among others.

About Carol Oja
Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and American Studies at Harvard and Faculty Director of the Humanities Program at the Radcliffe Institute. Her Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (Oxford University Press, 2014), won the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. Her most recent book is Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21^st Century, edited together with Charles Hiroshi Garrett and available via open access through the University of Michigan Press. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she has served as Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic; and she has twice chaired of the Pulitzer Prize committee in music. Her current book-in-progress is: Civil Rights in the Concert Hall: Marian Anderson and the Struggle Against Racial Segregation in Classical Music Performance.

About Jamie Bernstein
Jamie Bernstein is an author, broadcaster, filmmaker and concert narrator. In addition to writing her many articles and concert narrations, Jamie has traveled extensively, speaking about music as well as about her father, Leonard Bernstein. Jamie’s film documentary, “Crescendo: the Power of Music” has won numerous prizes, and is now viewable on iTunes. Jamie’s memoir, Famous Father Girl, was published by HarperCollins in June of 2018, and was released in paperback in June 2019. More about Jamie’s multifaceted life can be found on her website.

About John Mauceri
As Leonard Bernstein was completing MASS in the summer of 1971, he met Tanglewood conducting fellow John Mauceri, who assisted Bernstein the following year in preparing a tour of the work that culminated at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Bernstein subsequently gave Mauceri permission to develop a new interpretation of MASS at Yale; Mauceri conducted this production at Vienna’s Konzerthaus in 1973 —- the work’s European premiere. Mauceri is the recipient of many awards, including a Grammy, a Tony, an Olivier, and three Emmys. He has conducted most of the world’s leading symphony orchestras; has served as the music director of four opera companies; and is the former chancellor of University of North Carolina School of the Arts. For sixteen seasons, he led the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, restoring hundreds of compositions by refugee composers in Hollywood. Mauceri’s third book, The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century, is due to be published by Yale University Press in April 2022.

About Paulo Szot
Paulo Szot completed, in 2019, his seventh season with the Metropolitan Opera after his debut with Shostakovich’s The Nose conducted by Valery Gergiev and directed by William Kentridge, in 2010. In his Broadway debut, in 2008, with South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theater, Szot received a Tony Award as well as awards from Drama Desk, Outer Critics, and Theater World. He also received a Laurence Olivier nomination for the same role at the Barbican Center. Szot has performed at The Paris Opera, Real de Madrid, La Scala di Milano, and Opera di Roma. Symphonic appearances include performances with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, NY Pops Orchestra, and Warsaw Philharmonic. In 2019 he was the Artist in Residence at the OSESP Orquestra in Sao Paulo, and was invited to join Lincoln Center’s first Artist Committee. After his studies on the piano and violin as a child in Brazil, Szot returned to his parents’ country, Poland, to study at the University Jagiellonian in Cracow in 1987. In 1989 he received his first contract as a professional singer at the Polish State Company “Slask” — and since then, has never stopped singing.

About Douglas Webster
Douglas Webster began his affiliation with Leonard Bernstein’s MASS portraying the Celebrant as a graduate student at Indiana University in 1988. The IU production was invited to Tanglewood to be a part of the composer’s 70th Birthday celebrations. Since that time, Webster has become a foremost authority on MASS, having participated in over twenty-five productions, variously as Celebrant, casting director, stage director and/or producer. Those productions include performances at Carnegie Hall, The Vatican, and the Dallas Symphony’s JFK commemoration. As stage director, Webster has presented the work in fully realized staging as well as semi-staged concert format. Most recently, he directed the Bernstein Centenary celebration production of MASS for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. A dedicated educator, professor, and mentor to young performers, he has directed the American Singer International vocal training program since 1999. Winner of the Joy in Singing and Concert Artists Guild awards, he has performed in forty-six of the United States as recitalist and concert soloist.