On Meeting Leon Botstein

Notes from a First Meeting with Maestro Leon Botstein

Site: His residence at Bard College

Subject: Exploring the legacy of George Frederick Bristow and the possibility of a film

Following directions through quiet Hudson Valley roads, I eventually reached a residential cul-de-sac at Bard reserved for faculty. Botstein’s assistant had texted me clear instructions: "enter through the main door, walk through the foyer, and I would find him waiting in his library."

There was a sense of kinship, a familiarity—he and I could have been relatives. We looked like members of the same tribe. We explored those connections first: unknown corners of Poland, now Belarus, histories shaped by war and exile. Part of his family perished in the camps. So did mine.

He could have been a much taller relative

He wanted to know about my work, and I spoke of my films. He mentioned, almost in passing, that his daughter works closely with Ken Burns. Then we turned to what had brought us together: George Bristow and the upcoming concert at Carnegie Hall, where Botstein would conduct Bristow’s Fifth Symphony on January 30th.

On Meeting Leon Botstein

We spoke for hours—about Bristow, and what it means to create American music. After World War II, Hollywood embraced imperial aesthetics—Romans, Vikings—projections of American power. Quo Vadis and its like, later parodied by the Coen brothers. And then came the music produced for television shows: soaring, nationalistic, martial. But Bristow had already been writing that kind of narrative, nationalistic, forward-driving music—before the fact.

He talked about Rubin Goldmark, the bridge between Bristow and the moderns—Goldmark had taught both Copland and Gershwin. A New Yorker, rooted in two worlds. Bristow, too, had been that mix: European tradition and American ambition.

Botstein also recalled that Gustav Mahler was pushed out of the Metropolitan Opera as the German wave gave way to Italianate fashion under Giulio Gatti-Casazza. Yet Mahler had tried to program American music, turning to George Whitefield Chadwick and others. Mahler, Dvořák, Ernest Bloch—all tried to embrace the American spirit. Bloch even wrote a symphonic choral work titled America: An Epic Rhapsody in 1916. The conversation was quickly shifting into a master class—Botstein was teaching; I was learning.

But American composers struggled. Antonín Dvořák had two Black students; one of them, Will Marion Cook, founded what became a cornerstone of African American musical tradition. Arthur Farwell championed Native American music. Still, composers like Chadwick, MacDowell, and Bristow were often dismissed as imitators of Europe. Charles Ives remained the notable exception, forging an American idiom all his own.

I asked Botstein why were American composers of the 1800s accused of imitating European composers, when that was exactly what European composers were doing? Didn’t Beethoven draw inspiration from Mozart and Haydn, Brahms from Beethoven, Liszt from Chopin? He seemed to agree, and the discussion briefly turned to the difficult process of building a national identity—not just in America, but throughout 19th-century Europe. I was enjoying my self and I suspect he was also feeling comfortable with my presence.

And what of modern nationalism? he asked. He invoked names like Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, and spoke of the aesthetic split between patriotism and nationalism—two different spirits. Bristow, Botstein believed, stood for something more cosmopolitan. He didn’t believe that American music needed to follow the European standard. He believed it should speak in its own voice, forged in the energy of a young republic. The ideal of cosmopolitanism brought the conversation briefly back to the influences of Hannah Arendt on the young Leon Botstein.

“Walt Whitman was part of that voice,” he continued. European composers would later set Whitman’s words to music, but Bristow had already sensed that a new kind of poetry—and a new kind of music—was possible.

And so, a film begins to take shape. What began as a quiet walk through Woodlawn in search of Bristow’s forgotten grave led to a four-hour conversation at Bard with one of the country’s most respected educators. A composer once silenced by time, remembered only in stone—now begins to be heard again, through film.