Bernstein said her father liked all music, and he conducted classical music as well as composing music for Broadway. In this way he helped spread the love for both genres of music and people learned that there is no distinction when it comes to enjoying music, she said.

The notion that "music is hard to understand" doesn't only come from the introduction of Western classical music. It has long existed in China's history, which can be proven by many ancient stories.

The Chinese word zhiyin means very close friend, but its literal meaning is "understanding music." So it suggests when you can understand the music played by another person, you can be very close friends.

In the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.), there was a great musician named Yu Boya, who was a very good player of qin (ancient Chinese stringed instrument) and his music was considered to be too complicated to understand. One day, however, he met Zhong Ziqi, who could totally understand the content of his music and explain clearly what the melodies represented.

Yu was quite excited to find such a friend and made an appointment for their next meeting. However, Zhong died before the meeting, leaving Yu desperate and tearful. Yu smashed his qin and from that day no one would understand his music again.

But according to Zhou Haihong, Vice President of the Central Conservatory of Music, it is Yu who cannot understand music.

Zhou has long been endeavoring to spread classical music. He gave many lectures around China on how to enjoy music. His lectures are all very vivid and attract a large number of listeners. Zhou presents many ideas that are fresh and quite different to what has been touted before.

"Actually, everybody in the music circle knows a secret that many other people don't know. That is that all the explanations about music contents are just made up, meaning that you can interpret the music in your own way," said Zhou. He said that as long as you are a human being and you have emotions, you can understand classical music. "Many people were just misled by the explanations," he said.

According to Zhou, a student once told him that he enjoyed pieces of Ludwig van Beethoven and could recall a lot of memories when listening to music. But after the student read experts' explanations of the music, he found out that his understanding was totally "wrong." This made him frustrated to the point that he stopped listening to Beethoven after that.

Freedom to interpret

"Even the greatest musicians have very different or even totally opposite understanding of the same melody," said Zhou, whose idea was echoed by Bernstein, who compared her father with another great conductor, Herbert von Karajan. "They conducted music in quite different styles due to their different understanding of the music, but they are all great conductors," said Bernstein.

The reason that many people don't like symphonies or other classical music might be that classical music has no lyrics that are believed to make the music more understandable, and some melodies are very slow that make people lose patience, said Zhou.

Zhou compared classical music to football matches -- where the audience needs to wait a long time before the players score. "This is the charm of football, that is also why it is regarded as 'the most exciting game' and has the most fans of any sport around the world. People enjoy the process as well as climax," said Zhou.

It is very hard to find a proper word in Chinese to express the word "classical," so classical music has been translated to yansu yinyue (serious music) or gaoya yinyue (elegant music), which is far from the original meaning and has kept many people away who think they are not qualified to listen to this serious or elegant music.

"Music is the best way to communicate between people from different cultural backgrounds," Zhou said. "There is no separation in enjoying music. Try to enjoy classical music in your own way and believe me, it will make your life more colorful."