The composer Harold Shapero, who lived a few doors away from Bernstein in Newton and was a year behind him at Harvard, also noted Bernstein’s cavalier approach to counterpoint studies. “Lenny didn’t come to class at all. I was a dutiful little student. I did my Palestrina stuff and I got an ‘A.’ . . . Lenny showed up around the end of the first term and put a piece up on the piano. It was some kind of wild chorus, rather ugly and painful . . . . It had nothing to do with sixteenth-century counterpoint. In typical stentorian Harvard style, Merritt¹ said, ‘Well, Leonard, this is not exactly what we’re doing in class,’ and Lenny took his first and smashed it down and said, ‘I like it!’ I was astonished. . . . It showed the power of conviction that he had about his own music.”

(1) Professor Arthur Tillman Merritt

H. Burton, Leonard Bernstein, London, Faber & Faber Ltd, 2017, pp. 82-83.