Bernstein
for young people

On today's date in 1958, Leonard Bernstein asked a question: "What
does Music mean?" He posed the question specifically to an audience
of kids assembled at Carnegie Hall for the first of his "Young
People's Concerts" -- but since the concert was televised, it was
a question he posed as well to a much broader audience of all ages.
That January
18th concert opened with Rossini's "William Tell" Overture
-- music that "means" the Lone Ranger to most Americans, or
as Bernstein put it: "Cowboys, bandits, horses, the wild west."
But, he argued: "Stories are not what the music means at all. Music
is never about anything. Music just is. Music is notes, beautiful notes
and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening
to them, and that's all it is." Bernstein then demonstrated how the same music could plausibly be the
"soundtrack" to any number of different "stories."He concluded
with Ravel's "Le Valse" and these comments:
"Every once in a while we have feelings so deep and so special
that we have no words for them. Music names them for us, only in notes
instead of in words. It's all in the way music moves -- we must never
forget that music is movement, always going somewhere, shifting and
changing, and flowing, from one note to another; and that movement can
tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can."
https://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/audio_help/
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/leonard-bernstein/reaching-for-the-note/489/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZJ1Tgf4JL8&feature=related