Mad Men and American Music
One of the things that makes the show Mad Men so intriguing is its detailed depiction of early-1960s New York . In a post on his blog Classically Hip , John Clare dug through the New York Philharmonic's website to find the programs of concerts by the Phil in 1960 and 1961, the years that the first two seasons of Mad Men are set in. It's fun to imagine Don Draper and his pals out with clients, or mistresses, in a first-tier company box at Carnegie Hall, waiting for Bernstein to take the stage. The New York Philharmonic seems to have really gotten into the Mad Men spirit: over the last couple of seasons, they've been programming almost the exact same music as they did nearly 50 years ago. Back in March 1961, Bernstein brought Pierre Boulez's Pli selon pli, written only a few years before, to the US for the first time, and opened the season with his own overture to Candide and Roy Harris's Symphony No. 3 (composed in 1939 by a composer still very much active in 1