Learning and 'Teaching' Chichester Psalms With Leonard Bernstein

In the mid-1980s, after a long dinner party at the Leonard Bernstein residence in Manhattan, I went to the back of the apartment where Bernstein had his studio to tell him I was leaving. He was sitting behind his desk looking at a score of his Chichester Psalms. "I know that work very well," I said, with all the overconfidence of a kid in his early 20s. "I even conducted a performance of it by memory." He lit up because he knew he had a captive audience at that moment (nothing meant more to him ...