When and how did you become interested in classical music?

Believe it or not, I don't really have any idea. I did take piano lessons when I was young, and I'm sure I played some of the works. I also played alto and tenor sax in the school band and played in the "B" band while in college. I belonged to a community band which disintegrated during Covid.

I forgot about classical music in my teens and 20's, but somehow started listening to a few works in my 30's and my appreciation for and listening to has increased as I have aged. I also enjoy researching the background of a work. How about you?

Violin lessons and orchestra throughout my youth, as well as band (clarinet). Still playing!

Listened almost exclusively to pop and rock music as a teenager (with a bit of Jazz thrown in). Discovered Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Steve Reich in my early twenties. This gradually took me backwards into the classical repertoire.

My grandmother always had it playing when I visited as a child. So I have just always listened to it when I need a calm moment.

Most of my parents' recordings were Rogers & Hammerstein or Lerner & Lowe soundtracks and pretty much all of The Weavers' recordings (Ronnie Gilbert — what a beautiful voice!). There were a few classical recordings; I wonder whose violin concerto that was? So classical music was on the periphery and I enjoyed it, but I liked the others as well.

I can, though, remember exactly when I became impassioned about it. A Sunday afternoon at the cottage when I was packing to return to the city and casually listening to AM radio on a battery-powered portable with a 2" speaker. CBC for many years aired a Sunday program called "Organists in Recital" (now, of course, long gone) that featured organists from across the country. That day Victor Togni played Bach's Prelude & Fugue in D, BWV 532. I was transfixed; I had never heard anything as exciting as that, despite the no doubt appalling sound quality.

It's no exaggeration to say that I was transformed.

As a young boy, I listened on the radio to the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, until the orchestra disbanded in 1954.

I had piano lessons as a young boy and when I went to grammar school it seemed natural to choose music as one of my subjects for O-level. It was probably studying and beginning to understand classical music which led me to love it.

About fifty years ago there came to our elementary school a young lady to teach "the Suzuki Method" of violin playing to those who chose to join. I did, and later took piano, flute, oboe, and wound up auditioning for the Marine and the Army bands out of high school. I joined the Army. I am now retired.

It was a careful course of indoctrination by my mother: frequent exposure to her favorite composer, Tchaikovsky, a trip up to Boston to see the Boston Pops (Arthur Fiedler conducting!) at least twice a year, and finally listening to WBGH radio every morning while eating breakfast before school (anyone in New England remember Robert J. Lurtsema's tenure there?) In the end, I think I was a bit of a disappointment to her, though, as I became addicted to J. S. Bach, not to Peter Ilyich.