Interesting. For me the trip was in the other direction. Rock and Roll was
always around, so much so that I didn't even realize I'd noticed, until the
first day of my senior year at Johns Hopkins. My wife and I ran into a
friend who was also an avid classical music person. He said, "Come with
me--you've got to hear something." Very mysterious. We get to his
apartment. "Now I'm going to play you something. Don't say anything till
it's over." And he played "Yesterday." Wow, a rondeau! And that was it,
instant conversion.
Mark
At 08:39 PM 5/20/2005, you wrote:
>Mark wrote:
>
> >>Where to start is a tough one. My father had Bach and Beethoven
>recordings, but what got me was one of his other loves, Sibelius, especially
>the 2nd symphony. The two Bs came very quickly afterwards, but it was a good
>ten years of serious listening before I could understand the late Beethoven
>quartets and sonatas. A friend of mine, on the other hand, first fell for
>the opus 131.<<
>
>I'm jumping in in the middle here of something, I know, but I am assuming
>that Mark is talking about how he came to enjoy/love/appreciate classical
>music, and that the thread has something to do with what I means to listen
>to the stuff seriously and to get young people to appreciate it. Well, it
>reminded me that my entry into classical music was by way of art rock,
>groups like Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Renaissance, some of the Moody
>Blues--not only Nights in White Satin--and others that achieved in at least
>some of their music a large symphony-like sound (or even a chamber
>music-like quality) and a complexity that, while I wouldn't say it "solved
>the puzzle" of classical music for me, definitely helped me to see that, on
>some level, music was music and that there were all kinds of connections to
>be made between different kinds of music. Which is not precisely what I want
>to say, but my brain is dulled from grading endless and endlessly mediocre
>end-of-semester essays.
>
>Richard
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