If you saw Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro about Leonard Bernstein, it’s worth noting that the movie chose NOT to tell this story. Yet the truth is far more inspiring. And for the practitioners, commissioners, and end-users of brand strategy, far more instructive.

The story begins in 1937 when, still a student at Harvard, Leonard Bernstein sat next to the composer Aaron Copland at a dance recital in New York City. Bernstein was nineteen and idolised Copland. “He was the composer who would lead American music out of the wilderness” Bernstein said, looking back on that first encounter, “and I pictured him as a cross between Walt Whitman and an Old Testament prophet, bearded and patriarchal .” Copland was nothing of the sort, but he was celebrating his thirty-seventh birthday and invited Bernstein to his birthday party afterwards, where the young student impressed the guests by playing Copland's brutal, challenging Piano Variations. It was to prove the beginning of a decades-long friendship that would have a deep and lasting impact on Bernstein, and on the direction of American music. As Bernstein later recalled, "I don't remember a point when Aaron was not a presence in my life... He was my first friend in New York, my master, my idol, my sage, my shrink, my guide, my counselor, my elder brother, my beloved friend."

Copland became an informal professional mentor to Bernstein, advising him in musical composition and leveraging his immense status and reputation to introduce him to his musical connections. He recommended Bernstein when he applied to study conducting at the Curtis School of Music, in Philadelphia, and his endorsement helped secure Bernstein a place in the conducting program at Tanglewood, the famous summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its training academy.

Perhaps most significantly of all, Copland opened Bernstein's eyes to the greater vision, opportunity, and indeed need, that he could play a role in. It was a vision of American classical music that was accessible, democratic, suffused with the local idioms of jazz and folk, with a uniquely and distinctive national character quite different from the old European traditions of the time. Bernstein would later write, "Aaron created a vernacular speech for American music, which we needed desperately... His gift to America was a sound that could speak of the American experience."

But at the same time, Copland encouraged Bernstein to find his own distinctive voice. When in 1939, Bernstein was full of angst about his composition abilities, Copland wrote to him: "Stop worrying about whether your music is 'American' enough. Write what you hear inside. The American part will take care of itself – it's in your bones now." Copland pushed the young Bernstein to remove from his work any passages that revealed the influence of other composers. "You've got to get that out of your head and start fresh," he would say about a particular musical phrase. He urged Bernstein to find his own voice, to sound like no other composer but himself. "I want to hear about your writing a song that has no Copland, no Hindemith, no Stravinsky, no Bloch, no Milhaud and no Bartok in it," Copland instructed. "Then I'll talk to you."

Bernstein took Copland's vision and advice and ran with it. He began to embrace the dynamism, energy, and rhythms of urban life. With On The Town he became the first symphonic composer ever to collaborate on a Broadway musical, bringing together and integrating the world of jazz with the world of classical music. As he matured and developed he continued to innovate and pushed his art ever further, merging classical, jazz, and theatrical elements but never losing sight of creating a direct connection with an audience. ”I believe in communication," Bernstein declared in a 1958 interview. "Music that cannot communicate is not music I want to write."

And then in 1957 came the musical neutron bomb that was West Side Story, the work that is forever synonymous with name of Bernstein. More urban in sensibility than anything he had composed thus far, the energy and effervescence of jazz and Latin rhythms flowed through the orchestration. In 1957, during the creation of West Side Story Bernstein wrote: "I keep hearing your voice in my head saying 'simpler, simpler,' but this piece demands all the complexity I can give it. Forgive me?" Copland's response was characteristic: "The student must surpass the teacher, or what's the point? Write it your way – I'll learn from you this time."

Bernstein's didn’t stop there and continued to conduct, teach, compose into later life, always remaining true to his belief that music should speak directly to its audience. But Copland's influence on Bernstein went beyond purely musical matters. "Aaron showed me that being a composer meant being a complete musician," Bernstein reflected. "It meant teaching, conducting, writing about music, sharing music in every way possible." Nothing illustrates the vigor and passion with which Bernstein pursued that mission than his pioneering series of Young People's Concerts on CBS television. Between 1958 and 1972, Leonard Bernstein presented a total of fifty-three episodes. 

On 23 November 1966 an episode with the 'What is a Mode?' was aired. Bernstein’s gift was the ability to make such unpromising matter both accessible and compelling. Having explained to his youthful Sunday afternoon audience the three important musical modes (i.e. scales) - the Dorian, the Phrygian and the Lydian, Bernstein comes to explaining the Mixolydian mode. Sitting at the piano and with the serried ranks of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra behind him, Bernstein introduces what he calls "a really terrific song, a barbaric number", and starts to play and sing "Girl, you really got me goin'. You got me so I can't sleep at night…' And so the most famous conductor of the time is singing the Kinks to explain the Mixolydian mode. And then effortlessly transitions via a few notes from The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood into Debussy's majestic The Sunken Cathedral. This was Bernstein to a tee. As he explained in his final years, "The older I get, the more I'm convinced that all music is one... This is something I learned from Aaron – the artificial barriers between 'serious' and 'popular' music are just that: artificial."

In one of their final exchanges, just months before Copland's death, Bernstein wrote: "Dear Aaron – Looking back, I realize that every significant choice I've made as a musician somehow leads back to those first afternoons in your studio. You didn't just teach me about music – you taught me how to think about music, how to live it, how to love it." Copland's simple response spoke volumes: "Lenny – you learned the hardest lesson of all: how to be yourself."

Copland's alertness to Bernstein's potential, his invitation that Bernstein's see and pursue the greatest of visions, his technical coaching, his unstinting encouragement that Bernstein find his own unique and authentic voice, and his delight in seeing him take and run with that advice helped Leonard Bernstein become Leonard Bernstein. In all his flamboyant, charismatic, multidimensional, irrepressible, authentic, genre-defying, culture-defining glory. The great communicator.

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