January 20-26, 2005

music

Serenade

The epic Leonard Bernstein radio series was a labor of love for Mount Airy's Steve Rowland.

by Steve Cohen

In October 1990, Steve Rowland was ready for a vacation. He'd just completed The Miles Davis Radio Project, the eight-hour audio documentary he wrote and directed, which was broadcast on 200 stations across the United States. Such endeavors take time and money and rarely achieve anything more rewarding than critical success.

"I was on a ferry going to Martha's Vineyard with my wife and 2-year-old when I picked up a newspaper and saw the headline: "Leonard Bernstein is Dead,'" recalls Rowland. "I knew that my next documentary project would be about his life. He was a force of nature and a progressive thinker who was so accessible, vibrant and humane." One of Rowland's earliest memories was watching Pablo Casals and Bernstein on TV in his parents' Wynnefield home.

Before he could start on Bernstein, Rowland had to do a series on pop musicians that occupied him for five years. It aired as The Music Makers.

After that, he returned to his Bernstein epic. Fifteen years after the idea was born, Leonard Bernstein: An American Life hit the airwaves. The one-hour segments started on WHYY radio two weeks ago and will run every Friday through March.

As Rowland's documentary reveals, Bernstein's musical career was partially shaped in Philly. He graduated Harvard then went to the Curtis Institute from 1939 to 1941. During that time he conducted the Philadelphia Peoples Chorus and helped organize an all-black symphony orchestra. Bernstein became a celebrity in 1943 when, on a few hours notice, he substitute-conducted at a Carnegie Hall concert. One year later, the 25-year-old wrote his first Broadway show, On the Town.

Producer Rowland also has Philly roots. He attended Central High but graduated from Overbrook. At Temple he studied film and ethnomusicology. His ambition was to make documentary films about music, particularly world music and jazz. He shot footage about John Coltrane "but no one knew who I was and I couldn't get enough money." So Rowland subsisted as a waiter at Quisset in Ardmore and became the unpaid music director at WRTI from 1979 to 1984.

Rowland also ran a jazz club on Spruce Street with longtime friend and collaborator Larry Abrams in the 1970s, worked as a gofer on TV commercials and helped operate the Skycam at Live Aid in Philadelphia in July 1985.

He ended up turning his Coltrane interviews into one-hour installments for the radio. "I got an NEA grant for $10,000, but I wound up losing money by the time the programs aired." Programs distributed by public radio networks do not earn money for the writer or producer, no matter how many stations carry them. The creator's income is solely what he can get in grant money.

"None of my programs have made money," says Rowland. "We always run over budget. For The Music Makers we had Whoopi Goldberg narrate the Patti LaBelle program and Edward James Olmos, the Carlos Santana program. They got low, token fees, but still I wind up in debt. I like radio because you can tell a story, and I have a good reputation in it, but it's hard to support a family." He lives with his two children (now 12 and 16) and his wife, an artist and jewelry designer, in Mount Airy.

The Bernstein programs are designed to appeal to stations with either talk (like WHYY) or music (like WRTI) formats. The verbal content drives the series while the music weaves in and out behind the words. Although Rowland conducted all of the approximately 90 interviews, his voice isn't heard on the programs. Sound clips of the interviewees are introduced by Susan Sarandon, who recorded her narration in a New York studio after all the interviews were done.

The interviews bring out the many influences on Bernstein and the evolution of his work, supplemented by family recordings of the composer with his wife and children as well as correspondence. His personal letters are read with understanding by his eldest daughter, Jamie Bernstein. Over 700 stations are carrying the programs and, for the first time, Rowland is marketing a set of CDs of the series.

"I always wanted to get back to film but it never was financially possible," admits Rowland. "As it turns out, radio is an ideal medium for discussing the meaning of — and the effect of — music, because its emphasis is on language and on sound."

Leonard Bernstein: An American Life airs on 90.9 WHYY-FM Fridays at 10 p.m. through March 18.