Jee-Sun Huh asks:

>Just wondering how you guys started enjoying classical music ...

My father owned about a dozen classical LPs - they were from a label called
(IIRC) World Record Treasures (I think it was some sort of record club).
They included a lot of Tchaikovsky, as well as Beethoven's 5th, Dvorak's
9th, Franck's symphony and Sibelius's 2nd.  When I was about ten or eleven,
I particularly liked the Tchaikovsky 4th and 5th symphonies (almost as much
as I liked the Beatles - this was the late 1960s).

I started getting more into classical music when I reached my teens (about
1970).  There was no single reason - a few things happened concurrently
over a period of two or three years.

Around that time, there was a weekly CM television program conducted
by Andre Previn.  My parents had watched it in previous years, and as a
teenager, I was considered old enough to be allowed to stay up and watch
it too.

The Beatles went downhill, and there was (IMO now as then) no other pop
group anywhere near as good.

During the summer holidays, I used to listen to the cricket coverage on
Radio 3.  When the cricket was rained off (and it rains a lot in Britain)
Radio 3 went back to its normal music programming, and I'd listen to that
instead.

As we lived on a council estate, I didn't do music at school - children
from the posher parts of the town did music, but we did woodwork instead.
This was particularly fortunate, as it meant I could decide for myself what
I liked.  I didn't have to subscribe to the politically-correct theories
that every sort of music is as good as every other sort, and I didn't have
to pretend to like Bartok and Penderecki in order to pass exams.

By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I'd established my favourites
(Sibelius and late Schubert).  I listen to a much wider range of things now
than then, but that's in part because more of the things I like (especially
20th-century symphonic stuff) are recorded now than then.

Peter Varley
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