Why is it attractive? I suggest, because of the driving beat and the just-add-water profession of friendship. Consider first the latter. “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas”.

You do? Have we met?

“From the bottom of my heart.” Tell you what, next time I’ll settle for the top of your heart.

The driving beat is indicative of what is wrong with modern popular music. The Dorian Toccata and Fugue has a driving beat also, but it arises immanently from the exemplification of its own structure. When rhythmic pulsation must be sustained by banging on a drum, it is a sign that sense and spirit have become jaded, inert; something that must be poked and prodded once or twice per second, like an exhausted mule. It is joyless exuberance and spiritless animation.

By title, opening line, and style, the song is obviously Mexican. Then, it breaks into English. “I wanna wish…”

It is as if we are first being entertained by a Mexican band “out there” somewhere — perhaps, on the stage of a convention hall — which then shifts to addressing us in the second person, in our language.

A culture is presupposed — a multi-culture. Mexican accent and drum beat is unapologetically imposed, its right to do so taken for granted.

We the audience are allowed to keep a little space in our own land — these folks “wanna wish us” a Merry Christmas, after all, and they are even willing for a moment to condescend to the use of our (soon to be foreign?) language.

The organizing principle is to make an analogy between linguistics and music to try to discover how music conveys “meaning.”

Lecture 1 addresses “phonemes.” Just as every spoken language on earth utilizes a subset of a finite set of basic sounds (the various vowels and consonants producible by the human vocal tract), so all the musical systems in the world, however they might sound different superficially, are based on a set of tone relationships that are universal because based on the underlying Physics of how vibrations are set up with frequencies that combine in relations of proportionality.

Lecture 2 continues the analogy with the topic of “syntax.” He discusses various ways one might try to map the elements of music to those of sentences: e.g. note ~ letter, scale ~ alphabet — and rejects each in turn until lighting on Norm Chomsky’s “transformational grammar,” which he finds to be more adequate to the task. Just as pronoun substitution and elision occurs to make language more energetic and penetrating, the same techniques (mutatis mutandis) are used by the great composers. He describes Chomsky’s view of “surface” versus “deep” structure. Music leaps to the equivalent of the poetic “super-surface” immediately in its “surface structure.”

In Lecture 3, the discussion proceeds to “semantics.” The musical analog of figures of speech is explored: metaphor, ambiguity, simile, antonym, anaphora, chiasmus, asyndeton, “this is like that.” The lessons are illustrated by an actual rendition of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.

Lecture 4 explores the “delights and dangers of ambiguity.” The intentional moves toward ambiguity in poetry of the late Romantic period (e.g. Gerard Manley Hopkins) is reflected in the move to chromaticism in music. Tristan and Isolde, the “pinnacle of the 19th century,” reflected this move, which culminated in Debussy’s Afternoon of the Faun based on the ultimate tonal ambiguity, the tritone. Performance demonstrations of these pieces are given.

Lecture 5 moves into the 20th century. The “crisis” of the twentieth century was the sense that the stretching of tonal ambiguity had nowhere further to develop. Parallel developments of culture, including Marx, Freud, and Einstein are integrated. The 12-tone method of Schoenberg is explained, and sections of true beauty using this method are illustrated, as Berg’s Violin Concerto. “Ours is a century of death,” Bernstein explains, and this was revealed prophetically by Mahler, especially in the 9th Symphony, which is performed by way of illustration.

Lecture 6 is a tour de force survey of the twentieth century in art, literature and music. The themes of sincerity and ambiguity are emphasized. Various forms of ambiguity were used to rescue tonality, such as polytonality, whereby simultaneous chords in different keys are played, giving rise to a new sound still rooted in the old. Polyrhythm is also explored. Stravinsky was the eclectic rescuer of tonality: he was both a copy-cat and “consummately original.” T. S. Eliot and e e cummings are tied in. The principles are illustrated with a full production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. In conclusion, Bernstein declares that there is primal “poetry of the earth” that runs through music and that vindicates his thesis of a universal deep structure in music analogous to that of language.

The series can serve as a layman’s introduction to music appreciation. Though at times Bernstein annoys with ostentatious displays of erudition and name-dropping (leading besides its annoyance to occasional faux pas in the detail, for example — Berkeley didn’t believe in mind?!), I can recommend the series. There was much that was new and thought-provoking, which will lead to further study and reflection; and he did open the way for me to appreciate some modern music previously opaque to me. I would be interested to hear from someone if viewing the series opens up a previously obstructed access to classical music as such — I suppose it might. The unifying structures of a wide range of music are worthy of contemplation, even if the exact correspondence to Chomsky’s linguistic theory, or the theory itself, is ultimately overthrown.

At one end is a tracker pipe organ with clear plastic walls surrounding the works. (A tracker organ is one in which there is a direct mechanical connection between the keys and the valves of the pipes, allowing more sensitive playing than the later electro-mechanical assemblies in pipe organs of the last century.) The plastic walls (opposite to side shown) permit one to view the mechanic in action.

This organ was built by William and John Gray, Englishmen. Though early-nineteenth century, they preserved the Baroque voicing of the organ tradition.

One should be so lucky as to happen upon the museum while Mr. Klaus Pandrick is on duty.

Shown here is Herr Pandrick demonstrating the Gray organ.

He also played a number of harpsichords, virginals, chamber organs, and various other keyboard instruments.

Quite frankly, his solicitousness instantly bridged the gap of continents and language (the special vocabulary of musical instruments put my German in the dust compared to his English; so English it was) and became a highlight of my tour of Berlin.

Several keyboard instruments predated the modern piano.

The clavichord, which looks like a small table outfitted with keyboard, works by a device that lands on the string and remains sitting there. This allows a player to actually use vibrato (Bebung) by wiggling the key as it is held down with a finger, similar to how acoustic guitar players achieve the effect.

This one is probably a late clavichord, perhaps the sort that CPE Bach might have played: it has a wide range of 4 1/2 octaves, or 56 notes, suggesting the tail end of the history. It also is made to look like a piece of furniture, unlike earlier instruments, which were of rougher construction. Notice that there are nowhere near 56 tuning pins on the right side, which would mean that there are several notes assigned to each string; whereas a virginal would have one string per note.

The harpsichord sets the strings vibrating by a mechanism that plucks the string in response to a key being depressed.

Note the “soli deo gloria” painted into the flyleaf of this harpsichord (above). Many early keyboards were built by pious Dutch Reformed and other Protestants.

The double- keyboard instrument shown to left here is not standard enough to have its own name. One keyboard is a harpsichord; the one on the right is evidently a virginal.

I would judge the cabinet work of this particular creation a failure. The legging is weak — both inadequate in the feel of strength compared to the ponderous cabinet above, and the need for spreaders is usually a defect in my opinion.

The cabinet itself is heavy and boxy; but what could they do? I guess, given that I needed two keyboards in a small chamber, I would accept it, however reluctantly.

The modern piano uses hammers which strike the strings. This technique evolved last in the family tree of keyboard instuments

The Hammerflügel (below, in foreground, in front of organ) is an early wing-shaped precursor to the modern piano; note similarity to the shape of the later grand piano.

The museum also has strings, winds, and brass, but I focussed chiefly on the keyboards on this visit. It is near the home of the mighty Berlin Philharmonic, near the train stop Potsdamer Platz, and can be conveniently combined with a stop at the St Matthew church (Matthäuskirche).

Note how the Germans, during “advent” season, are incapable of not having a Christmas tree in every nook and cranny.

Downstairs is a nice little cafeteria, so that the lunch problem can be solved as part of the same excursion.