kennedy center

Tuesday, Oct. 14, would have been the 32nd birthday of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing political influencer murdered last summer. It is a birthday shared by George Floyd, Jr., asphyxiated by arresting police in 2020 and who would have been 52. The horror of these tragedies has roiled a divisive society, but must they now demand a political battleground of opposing memorials?/

The concept of a civic memorial has long and often been, in Western culture, the privilege of classical music. Music may be permitted to speak not of specifics but the essence of grief, a collective cherishing of existence.

There happens to be another anniversary, Tuesday, to acknowledge. Leonard Bernstein, a great gatherer of differences in his music, died Oct. 14, 1990, at 72. And all around us, as we approach the 35th anniversary of his death, are reminders of Bernstein as the megastar memorializer of the 35th president of the United States, and what those tributes to John F. Kennedy might mean for us today.

The must-see Los Angeles Opera production of “West Side Story,” which closes Sunday, is by Francesca Zambello, who heads Washington National Opera at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and where she is slated to mount her production of Bernstein’s classic musical in May. Saturday night at the Soraya in Northridge, Martha Graham Dance Company gave the world premiere of “En Masse,” which is based on Bernstein’s “MASS,” written to open the Kennedy Center, where “En Masse,” too, is headed in the spring.

Along with all that, Gustavo Dudamel caps his three fall weeks leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic this weekend with four performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Bernstein chose this epic score, known as the “Resurrection,” to memorialize Kennedy two days after his assassination in 1963. A large New York Philharmonic, vocal soloists and chorus assembled on a CBS sound stage for a live national television broadcast.

It was a Sunday and untold millions (there were no Nielsen ratings) gathered in their homes to watch a somber Bernstein begin Mahler’s symphony with gut-wrenching intensity and end it with an overwhelming sense of triumph 90 minutes later. As a legendary act of national healing, the broadcast riveted a shocked nation.

It still does. The following year, Bernstein channeled that Kennedy spirit into a famous performance of Mahler’s symphony at London’s Ely Cathedral that was televised in Britain and released on commercial video. It is that Mahler Second performance that Bradley Cooper chose as the musical centerpiece of his Bernstein 2023 biopic, “Maestro.”

Bernstein further memorialized JFK in the dedication of his Third Symphony, “Kaddish.” And then there was the Kennedy Center opening in 1971, with Bernstein doing the shocking. At the time and for the occasion, “MASS” seemed a bizarre mashup of pop, schlock, jazz, 12-tone, electronics, grand symphonic utterances, hippie currency, mysticism, traditional Catholic Mass, Jewish Sabbath service, anti-Mass climaxing with a psychotic and psychedelic breakdown of Mass’ celebrant and Vietnam War protest.

The general reaction to “MASS” was that of appall, no matter whether you worshipped Bernstein or couldn’t bear him, whatever your political or cultural orientation. President Nixon — who as vice president in the 1950s had attended a Bernstein festival of American music at the Hollywood Bowl and had accompanied Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic on a cultural tour to South America — stayed home.

In fact, “MASS,” after years of puzzled neglect, ultimately came to be heralded as a Bernstein masterpiece, a work that freed contemporary music of genre-fication. It gives permission not for anything goes but for anything goes together if you can find the right context. A slow awareness of the score’s genius has empowered a new generation, such as the conductor and composer Christopher Rountree, who made the new arrangement of parts of “MASS” for his genre-breaking orchestra, Wild Up.

The Graham company based “En Messe” on a flimsy premise, the discovery of a page or two of sketches that Bernstein made for a proposed score he meant to write for Graham in 1988. The discovery is minor. Bernstein and Graham knew and admired each other, but she was a footnote in his career.

In the end, Rountree wrote a short series on variations on two themes he extracted from the sketches that serve as an epilogue to the “MASS” suite. The themes are hard to discern and don’t matter. Rather, Rountree makes a gripping case in his variations for a way forward from Bernsteiniana to today.

The intent of “En Messe” was meant to cap a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Graham company, the oldest dance company in America. Graham 100 began a year ago with a revival of “Appalachian Spring,” Graham’s most famous piece, which also gave us Aaron Copland’s iconic score (the popularity of which was greatly helped by Bernstein’s recording).

The company has also revived another of Graham’s most important (and severe) dances, “Night Journey,” based around the last moments of the life of Jocasta (the mother of Oedipus in the Greek tragedy). The revival with Anne Souder as an imposing Jocasta, Lloyd Knight, an enthralling Oedipus, and Ethan Palma, a haunted Tiresias (the seer), retained all the work’s stunning power. William Schuman’s mostly forgotten score received a revelatory performance by Rountree and Wild Up.

“En Messe,” itself, did not serve its purpose to cap a centennial closer to the work of a seminal choreographer. It accomplished something more important by heralding a path forward. The company can’t live forever reviving Graham’s work or doing showy new dances such as “We the People” (also on the program).

Instead, Hope Boykin’s choreography added a dark intensity to Bernstein’s brightness. The stage was dim. Each dance featured a soloist in seeming personal meditation with the music, its rhythms and its spirit, and with the company’s other dancers, who appear ghostly figures in the misty distance.

Movement didn’t match music but brought you into it, while the music seemed to demand movement. It began with the score’s hit, “A Simple Song,” Bernstein at his most tuneful, even saccharine. Jodie Landau didn’t buy into its surface simplicity but sang with a fresh, cool, contemporary edge that immediately told you we were headed into unknown territory. Every discovery that followed proved her right on.

“En Messe” will tour the country and beyond over the next year with, unfortunately, a recording of Wild Up, not live performance. If the company gets over its overamplification, which cheapens everything it presents, that need not disastrously lessen the impact.

Will “En Messe,” or “West Side Story,” actually reach the Kennedy Center, which the federal government is attempting to turn it into who-knows-what, this spring? Both Bernstein works are exactly what the new overseers say they want — more populist art, inspirational attempts to make American art great. But they are also works that make us look inside ourselves, discover what matters beyond self-interest. That’s become a hard sell.

Snoopy is the superstar of the “Peanuts” world, but Ben Folds is loyal to Charlie Brown. “I’m going to have to go with Chuck because he’s so emotionally compressed,” the singer-songwriter said when asked for a favorite.

Folds didn’t grow up poring over the Charles M. Schulz comics or memorizing the TV specials — “I can’t think of anything I really was a fan of outside of music” — but he loved Vince Guaraldi’s music for the animated specials.

He started studying Charlie Brown and the gang when he was hired to write the title song for “It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown,” sung by Charlie’s sister Sally in the 2022 Apple TV special. And he recently dove back into the world of these iconic characters when he returned to write the final three songs for “Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical.”

“I think it’s good that I came to fully appreciate the world of ‘Peanuts’ as an adult,” says Folds, although he adds that he was still starstruck about writing for Charlie Brown. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” he says. “I was asking the Schulz family, ‘Can I say this?’ and they’d say, ‘Yes, it’s yours.’”

Ben Folds performs in concert during the “Paper Airplane Request Tour” at ACL Live at The Moody Theatre on December 11, 2024 in Austin, Tx.

(Rick Kern / Getty Images)

Folds’ best-known songs, such as “Brick,” “Song for the Dumped,” “Army,” “Rockin’ the Suburbs” and “Zak and Sara,” may seem too sardonic or dark for the sweet world of Snoopy and company. But he sees it differently.

“There’s a lot of deep stuff there. ‘Peanuts,’ like ‘Mister Rogers,’ presents an empathetic and nuanced, not dumbed-down view of the world, and that is rare for kids programming,” he says. “I was able to say stuff in my songs that kids will understand but that will go over the heads of many adults.”

He also knows how to approach the storytelling aspect of musical writing pragmatically.

Within the show’s parameters, Folds is grateful to the creators for giving him his artistic freedom. “They give me carte blanche and don’t push back” Folds says, adding that when he puts in poetic imagery — ”I’m not calling myself f—ing Keats or anything,” he adds as an aside — director Erik Wiese would weave those ideas into the animation. “That’s really cool to see.”

“My ambition is to have them tell me that my lyrics meant they could delete pages of script,” he adds. “That’s what these songs are for.”

Wiese says Folds was the ideal person to “take the mantle” from Guaraldi: “He brings a modern thing and his lyrics are so poetic; on his albums he always touches your heart.”

Writer and executive producer Craig Schulz, who is Charles’ son, was impressed by both Folds’ songwriting and the responsibility the musician felt to the “Peanuts” brand. “He has a unique ability to really get into what each of the gang is thinking and drive the audience in the direction we want to,” says Schulz, adding that there was one day where the writers got on the phone with Folds to explain the emotions they needed a scene to convey “and suddenly he says, ‘I got it, I’m super-excited’ and then he hangs up and runs to the piano and cranks it out.”

The first song Folds wrote for “A Summer Musical” was when Charlie Brown realizes that the camp he holds dear “is going to get mown over in the name of progress. I wanted him to have the wisdom of his 60-year-old self to go back to ‘when we were light as the clouds’ to let him understand the future,” he says. So it’s a poignant song even as he’s writing about Charlie Brown looking through “old pictures of people he met five days ago. That’s the way kids are — they’re taking in a whole world and learning a lot in five days.”

(He did not write the show’s first two songs, though you’ll hear plenty of Folds-esque piano and melody in them because, Wiese says, “We wanted it to sound cohesive.”)

In the final song, Folds’ lyrics celebrate the saving of the camp (yeah, spoiler alert, but it’s “Peanuts,” so you know the ending will be happy), but he laces in the idea that these children are inheriting a lot of bad things from older generations, including climate change. But it’s not cynical, instead adding an understanding that their parents did the best they could (with a “Hello Mother, Hello Father” reference thrown in for the old-timers) and that this new generation will do the best they can and make their own mistakes.

Franklin, Marcie, Peppermint Patty, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock and Sally in “Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical.”

(Apple TV+)

Folds says it’s important for people in the arts and on the left to bring a realistic view but not to become doomsayers.

“I see how bad it could get, but there are two stories you can always tell that might be true — one way to talk about climate change will leave people saying, ‘We’re screwed anyway so I’ll just drink out of plastic bottles and toss them in the garbage,’ but the other way is to motivate people, to tell a story that shows an aspiration towards the future.”

That does not mean, of course, that Folds is blind to the perils of the moment. He stepped down as the National Symphony Orchestra’s artistic advisor at the Kennedy Center to protest Donald Trump’s power play there.

“I couldn’t be a pawn in that,” he says. “Was I supposed to call my homies like Sara Bareilles and say, ‘Hey, do you want to come play here?’” But he’s focusing on the positive, noting that he’s now working with other symphony orchestras with that free time.

Folds has recently also tried countering the turmoil of our current era: Last year he released his first Christmas album, “Sleigher,” and his 2023 album “What Matters Most” opens with “But Wait, There’s More,” which offers political commentary but then talks about believing in the good of humankind, and closes with the uplifting “Moments.”

And obviously, Folds knows that a show that stars a beagle and a small yellow bird that defies classification is not the right place to get bogged down in the issues of the day. Even when the lyrics dip into melancholy waters, they find a positive place to land.

“In this era I don’t want the art that passes through my world to not have some semblance of hope,” he says.