Laurence Sherwood writes:

>But implicit in Don's argument is the notion that as many people progress
>along life's highway, they will be drawn to CM.  And yes, I've seen that
>happen.  Only I think that by and large the interest was something in the
>nature of a reawakening- someone in their formative years had introduced
>them to the the genre, so they had some sort of base on which to build.
>I've known several adults who developed an interest in CM, but when I
>queried them, I got answers like, "My mother played the piano", or "Aunt
>Thelma dragged me to the opera when I was a child." I am suspicious of the
>notion that people whose musical background contained nothing more enduring
>than what passes for popular culture will be attacted to CM as they get
>older.  My impression is they regard CM as offering nothing that would
>interest them, and tend to regard it with suspicion.  ...

I think I can safely say that my attraction to CM in later life came
without any significant childhood exposure to the genre except for
cartoons, movie music, and my junior high school music classes, which
were so tedious they probably had the effect of turning me off CM for
several decades thereafter.  Jazz was not an important early influence
either.  My family was mainly indifferent to music and if they listened
to anything it tended to be the pop music of the 40s and early 50s.  My
first exposure of any consequence came during my undergraduate years
when I knew a few friends that listened to CM and I would catch snippets
of it from time to time and agree that Wagner was pretty cool.  My first
wife had more exposure than me and I would sometimes let her drag me to
a concert or opera, but not often, and our record collection had a lot
of Beatles, Stones, Dylan and Baez and not a single classical LP. And
for the next 20 years or so, I would have that sort of occasional exposure
to CM but it was never anything I couldn't live without. It was not until
I had burned out on the pop music of the 60s and 70s, gone through a
mercifully brief period of country and western listening, and a period
of not caring much about music at all, that CM took with me.  By then I
was in my late 40s.  I have always attributed my rather sudden and still
active passion for CM to a concurrent bout of depression and overwork
that left me vulnerable to the powerful emotional appeal of the music.

Regards,

John Parker