29K views · 107 reactions | “Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.” - composer Leonard Bernstein who would've been 100 years old today. | Biography | Facebook

On this day in 1881, the infamous outlaw Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Decades later, in 1938, Aaron Copland brought the legend to life in music with his ballet Billy the Kid, commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein. 🗨️ “I have always considered his ballet Billy the Kid a masterpiece of stage music; it's not only rousing but also tender... and in its opening and closing pages it even has a majesty and grandeur as wide as the prairie, as lofty as the Rockies.” — Leonard Bern

Opening with an inexorable funeral march and culminating in an ecstatic hymn of resurrection, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 contemplates life and death on a cosmic scale. Leonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony Orchestra and Edinburgh Festival Chorus in this historic performance on Carnegie Hall : carnegiehallplus.com | Carnegie Hall