At What Age Did You Discover Classical Music?

[Corlyss_D]

Several have said they discovered classical music "later in life." Feel free to elaborate.

[some guy]

I grew up in a non musical family, though my dad's by then deceased mom had been a coloratura soprano, so I only knew what was on T.V.

When I was eight or nine, I got a bunch of 78s from my dad's half brother, which included Sparky's Magic Piano and Rusty in Orchestraville and sides one and four of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Well, it was love at first hearing. By the time I was ten, my parents signed me up for the Columbia Records mail order thing, and though the selections they picked for me (it was a birthday present, so a surprise) weren't all that good, it didn't matter.

From then on it was Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and Dvorak and Bach and Vivaldi and so forth. Yeah, baby! Until 1972, and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. Then it was Stravinsky and Janacek and Prokofiev, then Carter and Stockhausen and Varese and every album with the words "Electronic Music" on the cover.

Yeah, BABY!!

[Barry]

I clicked 20-40, but I was right around 20, so I could have just as easily picked 10-20.

[Corlyss_D]

I clicked 20-40, but I was right around 20, so I could have just as easily picked 10-20.

Okay. Good point. I'll fix it.

[stenka razin]

At ten. A combination of a music appreciation period once a week in elementary school and my older cousin's extensive classical record collection.

[TopoGigio]

First was the sound of the BigBang...the longest wavelongitude of that can be discovered one day...a rumble.With long wavelongitudes there are the
radiowaves...these "we" can hear, even from stars.And then,the frequencies of our domestic radios.War and Music came into homes of guys and dolls
...
Today even dead talk! By psychophonies. "

Many think a psychophonie must be not used in an artwork but sometimes
i think thats as a roar of a lion or the thrill of birds...an effect acceptable
in modern times.We can put the voix of a real frog for timbre
for a complete piece...but its more elegant a mix patchwork of timbres
(psychophonies,roar,bird,frog) for a recorded piece...impossible on concerto!

[The Ninth]

^ What the heck is this person trying to say?

-----

I grew up with rock and pop, but during high school my main musical interest became electronic music of all kinds.

I discovered classical when I was 20 or 21 with a "music appreciation" course in college. The first composition I remember really enjoying was Bach's Organ Fugue in G Minor (BWV 578), and classical music has continued to keep my interest ever since.

[TopoGigio]

I think im pretty clear! I make those things!
Even the humming of a hummingbird can be music into a piece!
By the way, the hummingbird or a beau-deer are images of the
abducted people.Yu can put hummmmmm in your piece! But how
put a beau-deer?

[Donaldopato]

I was a young teen classical music nut. I always moved to a different beat so I wanted to listen to music no one else did. So since most of my peers were into rock and such, I did classical. I soon discovered it was not half bad!

[IcedNote]

Started playing classical piano at the age of 5. Didn't appreciate it until 15. Didn't decide to make music a career until 19.

-G

[Beckmesser]

I discovered classical music in my early teens. My parents had no knowledge of classical music; for them music was Lawrence Welk.

I started taking piano lessons at age 8 and violin lessons at age 10 (free at my local public school, instrument included). Once I got past the initial fluff I discovered the world of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn (in simplified arrangements, no doubt). Those were the days when music appreciation was still taught in public schools. Not only that, there was classical music on television (The Voice of Firestone, The Bell Telephone Hour, Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, etc.).

I grew up in a small city in the upper Midwest but there was a fairly active concert scene. The population was of mostly Scandinavian and German descent. We had a symphony orchestra (largely amateur musicians) and the three local colleges each had its own artist series. The Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) made an annual appearance and Boris Goldowsky's opera company appeared several times. Before I got my driver's license I had to beg my mother to drive me to all these events. I remember seeing Claudio Arrau, Mieczysław Horszowski, Glenn Gould, Byron Janis, and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

I started collecting records at the age of 12. My first LP was Beethoven's Fifth paired with Schubert's Unfinished (Munch conducting the BSO). Naturally there weren't many kids my age with an interest in classical music but I managed to make three very good friends who shared my interest.

There wasn't much classical music on local radio but we were close to the Canadian border so I would sit in the car and tune in CBC Winnipeg on the radio. I still remember hearing that famous concert broadcast of the New York Philharmonic at which Leonard Bernstein made his remarks before Glenn Gould performed the Brahms D Minor Piano Concerto. Fortunately I never managed to kill the car's battery.

[Beckmesser]

^ What the heck is this person trying to say?

TopoGigio is our resident poet.

[Corlyss_D]

^ What the heck is this person trying to say?

If we could understand him, 9th, half of the people would want him gone because they didn't like what he said, and the other half would want him gone because he disturbed the first half. Ignore him.

[Ken]

It seems as though I stumbled across the genre at about the same age as many of you. I think I was 15 years old when I first began listening to real music after having been ignorant of it for my earlier years. I only began listening with any seriousness when I was 18, and I'm 24 now. Yep, I'm still a newbie.

My record collection is pretty paltry, but I promise that as soon as I have an income that allows for more expenditure, I'll work on catching up to some of you forum magnates!

[Seán]

^ What the heck is this person trying to say?

If we could understand him, 9th, half of the people would want him gone because they didn't like what he said, and the other half would want him gone because he disturbed the first half. Ignore him.

Oh that's brilliant Corlyss, well said.

[Seán]

Well, did I discover classical music late in life? Yes I suppose I did. To be honest I have only recently developed a real passion for classical music, by that I mean within the past year or so.
When I was in my teens all of my friends listened to pop whilst I used to listen to Julian Bream, Stravinsky, Bruch, Indian ragas, Hendrix and Ellingon, an eclectic mix I suppose. I settled on Ellingon and developed a deep love for jazz music. For many years I collected a wide variety of jazz recordings until circumstances dictated that music take a "back seat" in my life.
In the last few years I have returned to collecting records with a new found passion. To my ear the developments in the jazz world today do not really excite. So last year I went on a voyage of discovery. I bought the Stravinsky 22 CD set, it is a superb collection of the masters work. I then bought two Mahler CDs and now I'm hooked. I rarely listen to jazz, it's classical music almost all of the time.
By the way I'm in the 40 to 60 bracket. So, there you go Corlyss, this post could be entitled, "the confessions of an oul fella".

[Teresa B]

I was exposed to classical music from birth, as both my parents were musicians, and I took music lessons from age 7 on, but my appreciation for it didn't really kick in until around age 16. My dad told me years later, he knew I was hooked when I had listened to Beethoven's 6th Symphony, and I asked him "Did you ever hear music so beautiful it hurt to listen to it?"

Teresa

[Bro]

Right at about the time John Lennon was shot ( late teens). Rock was headed for the doldrums (I'd burned out on the punk thing and didn't know where to go) The US (and the world) was headed for conservative governments. It seemed time to grow up my musical tastes. The piece that 'sounded so good it hurt' was the Beethoven 7th.....


The 70's were a time for barefoot, dirty feet and pot smoke... and that Fleetwood Mac album you thought you had but a friend stole it ect ect... Thank god for the 80's, adulthood, and the bold new adventure....


Bro

[greymouse]

I clicked 11-20 for 17 years old. Like anyone else here, I heard it as a kid several times (just the popular tunes), but it was a college appreciation class that made me start listening to the radio, buying CDs, and playing piano. Then I took a few years of classes in music and decided I couldn't be a musician. So my experience is mostly sophomoric as a result.

One of these days when I get more time, I'd like to really dive into opera and try to figure it all out. It's a big grey area for me.

[Lance]

For me, actually from birth with a soprano-opera-singing mom, who traveled the world, and a professional trumpet player dad who played with the Met Orchestra, and the Columbia Orchestra in NYC. Piano lessons started at 5 and from there everything evolved and hasn't stopped since. I studied trumpet, piano, voice (baritone), accordion, and ballroom dancing. I really wanted to play the piano more than anything else. My problem: I had the heart and mind for it but didn't want to work! To have been a Rubinstein, or a Gerald Moore, accompanying great lieder singers ... that would have been perfect. Maybe in the next life!

[Agnes Selby]

I honestly don't remember. It just happened. I loved
my grandmother's piano playing as a child. I also loved her
stories about my great-uncle, Josef Weiss who walked out
of a concert he way playing in New York conducted by Mahler. I went to
symphony concerts as a school girl and took piano lessons
at St. Vincents College in Sydney which was a total disaster and
Sister Perpetua gave up on me and advised me to take up typing.
But my love of classical music continued and here I am still loving it.

And as a special bonus - my daughter is a concert pianist.

Agnes.
------

[Fugu]

About 23, when cds first came out. Before that, I was a rock buff and only listened to that kind of music. Now I listen mostly to classical.

[TopoGigio]

In other extreme of the poll, can exist a MinusZeroYears...many of us
heared "classical music" from the womb along many sounds.Its a sort
of psychophony for the boy/girl, before the birth
Insofar Ich cannt vote!
As for the "soundly music" (and "soundly running") of our time can
include real psychophonies of They... Its simple and poetic!
(its no room for methodology here)
Try hear "Inori" of Stockhausen from the womb!

[RebLem]

What started me out was Van Cliburn's winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 when I was 16. His recording of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto 1 was the first record I ever bought. I now consider that performance one of the weakest of the work, and I'm not really too fond of the work itself, actually. But, it got me started.

Then I started borrowing LPs from the Elmhurst (IL) Library. I tried chamber music, but I found I didn't really like it. That would come later, with more maturity. The first works I found I liked a lot would actually make a nice concert program: the Haydn Military Symphony (the Scherchen performance), Wagner's Overture and Venusberg Music from Tannhauser (Bruno Walter), and Stravinsky's Firebird (Stravinsky).

The first Beethoven I really liked was the Symphony # 7, and then the Emperor Concerto.

And then I started listening, occasionally, to the MET broadcasts on Saturday afternoons, especially on very cold winter days when I didn't want to go outside. But opera is still one of the weaker sections of my collection. Probably about a quarter of my complete operas are Callas performances. Second weakest area is probably solo piano music, but my collection has been growing there, as I am finding it more and more interesting. But the bulk of my collection is classical, romantic and twentieth century orchestral and chamber music; also Bach, including the complete Hanssler edition.

I have a special love for Russian music. My mother always used to say that she thought my interest in classical music came from the fact that they didn't have much money when my parents were first married, so one of their principal entertainments was going down to the Grant Park Concerts on weekends, which were free, including the period when she was pregnant with me, in the summer of 1942. The founder of the Grant Park Concerts, and the music director at the time was Nikolai Malko, who, of course, programmed a lot of Russian music. So that may have been the source of my particular love for Russian music, too.

Posted on May 3, 2008. RebLem

[anasazi]

I started piano lessons at 5 and eventually got to play some Chopin by the time I was nearly high school age. I don't recall any sudden clicking with classical music, but it was just always there and I think I rather liked playing classical music (on piano) more than the current pop or rock songs of the day. I didn't really begin buying any albums until around 1958-1960 and most of those first recordings have remained favorites for me years later, often against much better recent versions.

[moldyoldie]

Classical recordings were played in the house when I was a youngster. I distinctly remember Munch's Bolero, Dorati's Scheherazade, and Beecham/de Los Angeles's Carmen. Also in my folks' record collection were Toscanini's Beethoven Seventh, his 1812 and William Tell Overtures, and several others. When I learned to work the console stereo, and when the house was empty for whatever reason, I'd indulge my curiosities.

My first classical LP, a requested birthday present when I was about nine or ten, was Bernstein's Beethoven's Fifth. To this day, it's my favorite rendering...of course! I remember it being marketed in both mono and stereo; I chose the mono since it was a buck cheaper. Even then I was made aware of cost/benefit!

[dulcinea]

When I watched THE LONGEST DAY, the sound of the V for Victory caught my attention, and I investigated what music started with PA-PA-PA-PAM! Incidentally, a type of musical ignoramus that is very common in Puerto Rico is the idiot who thinks that dropping the name of Beethoven and his Opus 67 is irrefutable proof that that type of snobbish ignorant idiot actually knows what Kunstmusik is all about.

[Ricordanza]

Started playing classical piano at the age of 5. Didn't appreciate it until 15. Didn't decide to make music a career until 19.

Same two out of three for me: studied piano beginning at age 5, but started to appreciate classical music--listening to classical music on the radio and borrowing records from the library--at around age 15, so I clicked on the 11-20 category. But I ceased piano lessons at age 18 and didn't pursue a music career.

[Chalkperson]

I first heard the 1812 Overture when I was nine, and played Cello in the National Youth Orchestra of Wales when I was 14 but I ran away from home to London at 16 to Photograph Rock Bands and never played another note...

[Wallingford]

For me it started when I was four or five, and listened frequently to my aunt's old Vogue Picture Disc (78 rpm, of course....among the most valuable & collectible 78s even today) of GERSHWIN's RHAPSODY IN BLUE, played by Phil Spitalny's Hour Of Charm All-Girl Orchestra ("....featuring Eleanor at the piano"). It was a truncated version, of course (made to fit two 10" sides), and I still LMAO whenever I have the gumtion to dig up my tape of it. Last time was over 20 years ago.

Then, after Sis & I got our first itsy-bitsy record player, I sort of got hooked on the Disneyland longplay album ST-3915, The Great Composers--with narration & snipped-out excerpts played (hideously) by Camarata. I was sort of buffaloed by this music, but it almost has to be chalked up to the awful playing. Here was my intro to the 3 Bs, Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Chopin & Tchaikovsky.

Then I moved on to The Golden Record Library (circa fourth grade): some old Denver friends of my parents', the same ones who lovingly shelled out for accordion lessons for their daughters, had these albums, which on volumes #3 ("Great Classical Music") and #10 ("Music Of The Great Composers") had mainly arrangements for small woodwind ensemble of familiar themes....the volume #3, however, had full-length, original orchestra performances of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and some Peer Gynt excerpts.

Owing to my rural origin, it was a good many years till I was able to find albums for my own collection. Personally frustrating, in fact....it was hard to find anyone, outside of my band & piano teachers, who sympathized with my plight.

[Richard Mullany]

I'd be happy to share your plight Wallingford; I bought my first record, a Columbia 78, 10 er" about 1943, from the Sears catalog. It was called "Strauss Waltzes in Dance Tempo". What it meant, since waltzing IS a dance, is that Al Goodman and his "orchestra" played Voices of Spring in a sort of fox trot tempo. I was really disappointed but a year later an aunt surprised me with the gift of a 12" record of "Der Frulingstimmen(sp?) played by a symphony orchestra and my mind was blown away by the difference.
I was recently able to re-hear that Goodman opus. A friend had inherited a box of old 78's from her mother and there was the album of four 10" 78's. She also inherited her moms record player, and so the sonic experience was ideal in the autenthicity.... Godawful best describes it, absent amazing surface noise it was stll so badly played, so trite that about two minutes and I was pleading with her to turn it off.

[Reed]

I'd have to say early-mid 20's before it really grabbed me.

I used to like going to the symphony on our annual school trip in grammar school. I liked some movie scores, including those which used classical music, such as 2001 and Barry Lyndon of Kubrick.

But I really started listening later, when I bought some used Bartok and Mozart and Bach records. Pretty soon I was listening to the local (DC) NPR station, when NPR stations played music. Then it was frequent trips to the record stores (remember those?) and pretty soon the concert halls as well. This was in DC in the 70's, and the Library of Congress concerts, many with the Julliard Quartet, were free, and there was other free or cheap music to be had, not to mention the radio.

And now I spend a fair amount of my disposable income, such as it is, on concert tickets and CDs. It's a habit, like drugs but better for you (I think).

[Auntie Lynn]

When I was four, Mama turned on the Met broadcast of Rigoletto. It was one of the first. I thought it was the greatest thing I ever heard. When I was five, Mama bought a spinet piano and I started lessons. When I was seven, I discovered I could play anything I heard..what I think they call The Magic Ear. When I was 16, she bought a Steinway grand. Went to college/grad school and majored in music theory. I now work for one of the ultimate high profile performing arts organization playing piano all day. The rest is history...

[Jack Kelso]

I was four---according to my mother---when I had Strauss' "Till Eulenspiegel", Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto and Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" committed by memory. That fact contributed to my relative ease in always learning new works by ear (if not from the score!).

Not until I started taking piano lessons did I discover Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and others---not to mention some lighter fare (Auber, Godard, etc.).

Tschüß!
Jack

[Wallingford]

Another thing worth bellyaching about is the profusion of "excerpts" discs that fade in and out on the "familiar tunes," proposing to give you the best deal for your money in featuring about two dozen such slices, on one LP! My mother got a few of these from some mail-order outlet in the late 60s, on the CAMELOT label, featuring some obscure Italian orchestras willing to perform..."for a song."

The albums also featured a Tchaikovsky volume with two side-long medlies, featuring a near-complete "Waltz Of The Flowers" in its original orchestration--albeit with the familiar horn quartet replaced by a....PIANO!!! Cheesy stuff.

There was also a Gilbert & Sullivan album apparently for those who can't stand at all "art-singing," as these were instrumental medlies too! (Possibly your parents or grandparents.) Fortunately, my great liking for G&S was fostered around this time by Volume 9 of The Golden Record Library, entitled "The Best Of Gilbert & Sullivan." This was also available separately in regular record stores as A Child's Introduction To Gilbert & Sullivan.....many numbers had one or two verses deleted (and The Mikado's marriage proposal from Ko-Ko to Katisha, "There Is Beauty In The Bellow Of The Blast," very discreetly leaves out the verse about Katisha's "elderly" body being "sufficiently decayed"). But integrity was not too significantly sacrificed, nor was the record's insurance that a youngster could be led to admire these verbal (and musical) gems: mainly through the use of American singers. It's still my all-time-favorite G&S disc!

[Madame]

During my high school years -- my father insisted that we watch 'The Bell Telephone Hour' each week -- and then, like Rob, I was captivated by Van Cliburn in 1958. The opera 'Carmen' kind of snuck up on me, beginning with Carmen's Boogie by Andrews Sisters and Mills Bros I believe. For you 'youngsters' -- you can listen to an excerpt here:
http://www.dizzler.com/music/The_Andrews_Sisters (near the bottom of the list).

[dulcinea]

a type of musical ignoramus that is very common in Puerto Rico is the idiot who thinks that dropping the name of Beethoven and his Opus 67 is irrefutable proof that that type of snobbish ignorant idiot actually knows what Kunstmusik is all about.

Have any of you ever met gourd-heads of this type?