On today's date in 1958, Leonard Bernstein asked, "What does Music mean?" He posed the question 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 nationwide audience of all ages.

That 1958 concert opened with Rossini's "William Tell" Overture – music that "meant" the Lone Ranger to TV audiences back then, or as Bernstein put it: "Cowboys, bandits, horses, the Wild West."

But, Bernstein argued: "Music is never about anything. Music just is. Music is 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."

Bernstein concluded his first Young People’s Concert with Ravel's "La 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 and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can."