Karl Miller:

>I can remember listening to classical music as a kid and thinking, why
>are these good parts separated by such long boring parts.  Some 40+ years
>later I still have my favorite parts, but now I appreciate the "good
>parts" even more since I can follow the rhetoric of the piece which gets
>me to the "good parts."

I remember this kind of response as a kid--and even more recently.  But
what has happened to keep some pieces alive for me is not so much awareness
of "the rhetoric," perhaps, as simply the experience of letting overfamiliar
parts slip by the way the "boring" parts did, and noticing for the first
time the delights of those formerly boring passages.

Jim Tobin