Jee-Sun Huh has opened floodgates of our memory by writing:

>Just wondering how you guys started enjoying classical music the way you
>do today.

I had to start enjoying classical music more than once.

Only my older sister Truffy remembers the first time, when I was about
seven years old.  Among her Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell LPs was a CBS
album entitled "Beethoven's Greatest Hits" picturing the composer in
bruised blotches of watercolours.

One day my sister played the first track for me.  The 5th Symphony's
first movement with Bernstein/NYPO.  She recalled that a glare of intense
concentration darkened my cherubic face.  The seed was planted.  Classical
music's tendrils then climbed through my youth, providing sustenance,
pleasure - and they clung inextricably when I wished I'd never heard a
note.

My parents then encouraged me with a Reader's Digest "Festival of Light
Classics" box - peerless CBS classical pops on rumbling vinyl.  They
sustained me 'til my early teens, when a penfriend recommended the
Britannia mail-order company.  My first order of Bohm's VPO Beethoven
Symphonies and Karajan's BPO Holst Planets consolidated my preference for
orchestral blockbusters and showpieces.

My school lent me a French horn which I parped with enthusiasm.
Eventually I heard a tape of my playing.  I laughed for a long time at the
noises I made, and returned the instrument.  I was destined to be a music
enthusiast, not a performer.  Also, I couldn't really hear myself play.

My enroaching deafness also meant that live concerts sounded as
overwhelming as a pocket radio, distorted and diminished by my hearing
aids.  But I persisted, thriving on the communal experience, from the
Ulster Orchestra of my schooldays to the BBC Philharmonic and Halle
Orchestras when I studied at Manchester University in the late 1980s.

Classical music on the hi-fi sounded fine using powerful headphones
with boosted high frequencies, but my hearing aids' distortion of live
music gradually became intolerable.  In 1989 I discovered a portable
mic-amplifier-headphones device which conducted the sound more richly.
I started to enjoy classical music again, in its ideal setting.

My first job took me to Birmingham in 1991.  In the recently-opened
Symphony Hall, Simon Rattle and the CBSO began a golden age of
music-making.  After a few months, though, the music stopped; Meniere's
Syndrome unexpectedly robbed me of all hearing.  I feared I was deaf for
life, but I continued to read music scores, which previously helped me
realise what I was *supposed* to hear, even if it was inaudible.  If I'd
had any sense, I should have sold my CDs and found another interest - but
the tendrils still clung.

Two years later, my hearing started to recover.  I could no longer hear
anything above 2kHz, and sustained pitches between Middle C and F# jumped
a fifth with every heartbeat.  Live concerts sounded a mess, CDs' wide
dynamic range were a struggle to encompass - but my memory of familiar
works filled in the gaps.  The greatest musical losses were Bach, whose
counterpoint became physically too difficult to disentangle, and the
high-pitched adventures of contemporary music.

By 1995, I managed to grasp my first unfamiliar music for four years, with
the help of the score and repeated listening:  Sibelius' 3rd Symphony.
Play its first two minutes now and imagine my surge of elation.  I had
started to enjoy music again.

Since then, my greatest Birmingham and London concerts overcame the aural
barriers and gave me transcendent thrills.  The burgeoning Internet and
this Moderated List helped me discover new musical treasures and cherished
friends.  A few days ago, Meniere's Syndrome laid waste my hearing a second
time.  Deaf, dizzy, with tinnitus screeching like a modem gone berserk, I
already ask, "When can I start to enjoy classical music again?"

James Kearney
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