Expanding One's Taste

[Joseph K]

It might... I'm just going by my own experience which was that my attraction to modern music and baroque music was immediate, led to exploring earlier and non-European musics, and the period 1750-1900 came last and I still have my blind spots especially in 19th century music, although I will no doubt eventually come to a better appreciation of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and it took me almost as long to find my way to some 20th century composers such as Bartók and Ravel although I wouldn't part with their work for anything now. What all this suggests to me is that musical taste isn't a matter of liking some things and not others but of liking some things and then others...

I'm similar - my blind spots used to be music from the latter half of the 18th century, and I took to modern music right away - three of the first classical disks I remember ordering online were Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Turangalila Symphony and the Xenakis one with Metastasis, Pithoprakta and Eonta. I also took to (most) 19th century music right away. I guess it's all well and good if you take to something straight away - but since you mention liking something then something else, I guess it's the process of this 'then' that you could perhaps share with us to illuminate one's blind-spots; as for me, I came gradually to appreciate the kind of clarity and formal abstraction one finds in Haydn, the melody and judicious textures of Mozart and the playfulness and unexpectedness of both these composers (also hearing the music in HIPP helped).

I think this would be best suited to a new thread, so here it is. Richard's post is from the What Are You Listening To Now thread.

[Mario]

Thank you to you both! I had thought about starting a thread along the lines of, “How to move on/from, the classics", but I didn’t want to be seen as hogging the forum.

But you have done it for me. Can’t wait for the replies.

Mario

[Serial_Apologist]

Upbringing, circumstance, psychological disposition and generationality come into this, wouldn't one say?

[Joseph K]

Upbringing, circumstance, psychological disposition and generationality come into this, wouldn't one say?

Yes - in several ways e.g. what you gravitate towards firstly and the ways in which - as well as whether - your tastes change, maybe they become more and more inclusive, or maybe some of what you liked before you end up rejecting. I suppose what I'm interested in - not just in the case of Richard B, but anyone - is how these changes occur, how entrées into new aesthetic horizons are begotten.

[cloughie]

Upbringing, circumstance, psychological disposition and generationality come into this, wouldn't one say?

All those plus participation - what you sing or play. Also a lifetime of listening and developing a broad palate with multiple genres there’s actually a reckoning to be done on whether to expand taste or narrow down and specialise. How much do I want to be challenged and in what areas?
Maybe expanding my taste was more of an issue in my teens, 20s, 30s…. thn it is in my 70s - how much can an old dog be tricked? But I’m happy to be treated with the right tracks!

[Mandryka]

Yes - in several ways e.g. what you gravitate towards firstly and the ways in which - as well as whether - your tastes change, maybe they become more and more inclusive, or maybe some of what you liked before you end up rejecting. I suppose what I'm interested in - not just in the case of Richard B, but anyone - is how these changes occur, how entrées into new aesthetic horizons are begotten.

I can answer this question with some confidence. Over the years I’ve met people who I’ve found inspirational - because of their understanding and their manner - and I’ve let them lead me to new musics. It all started off with an opera fan who introduced me to Verdi and Wagner. Then there was a piano fanatic who led me to Chopin and Beethoven - and he also give my my first taste of Bruckner and Mahler. Then someone who was interested in what he called “modernism”, who led me to Webern and Feldman and Ferneyhough. And then a man who is passionate about early music, who lead me to Ars subtilior and Ockeghem and baroque keyboard music.

In all cases, I let myself be led to fresh fields because I trusted another person enough to exchange ideas, and to follow suggestions.

[Serial_Apologist]

Yes - in several ways e.g. what you gravitate towards firstly and in which - as well as whether - your tastes change, maybe they become more and more inclusive, or maybe some of what you liked before you end up rejecting. I suppose what I'm interested in - not just in the case of Richard B, but anyone - is how these changes occur, how entrées into new aesthetic horizons are begotten.

In a kind of naive wonderment, in my case! I had the good fortune to be born into musically relatively literate family circumstances - my mother a brilliant and at one time professional pianist with an abiding love for music of the early Romantic period, chiefly Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin; my father less pianistically gifted, as he ruefully recognised, but more open to other eras and styles than Mum, as reflected in his collection of 78s and, as I grew up, LPs. Though his lifelong favourites always remained Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Elgar and Vaughan Williams, he opened my ears to a few composers he (b. 1908) in common with his generation, thought of as "modern". Being in the school choir, and later heading it, exposed me to composers such as Tallis, Purcell and Howells, and through them to modal as opposed to diatonically founded music, and I remember first thinking of modally-shaped harmonic and polyphonic movements as being "wrong", a consequence of the strength of major-minor diatonic norms of tension and resolution in shaping one's feelings and expectations of narrative, conflict and fulfilment. Starting out, in my head, appreciating simple cyclic forms such as Strauss waltz sequences, I could quickly remember which theme followed which, and by the age of seven I could accurately recall the Schumann piano concerto from start to finish in my head.

Thus it was harmony more than anything else that won my attention and kept me interested: I grew increasingly intrigued by the "strange harmonies" I was hearing in composers ranging from Rimsky-Korsakov to Holst and Delius, my only possible sources of reference; I can remember at about the age of 12 a music class in which we were introduced to Debussy's "La mer", and being captivated more by its unexpected harmonic twists, "traps", and Debussy's unpredictable ways of escaping them, than its new orchestral colours and combinations. At that stage the only Schoenberg I had heard, (I hadn't heard any Berg or Webern at that stage), I had been unable to make any sense of: it was only later, hearing "Verklaerte Nacht", that I was struck that there must have been some change or evolution that had led from the one to the other. This was helped by having visited a Picasso exhibition while on a summer exchange to France, where by exhibiting the paintings chronologically one could see how he had developed from naturalism by way of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Cubism, and make sense out of the latter: something in parallel must have taken place to bring about "modern music". Dad bought his first stereo hi-fi when I was 13; we went to the local record shop and I was given partial carte blanche to choose new recordings. One was Monteux conducting "Le Sacre"; another Bartok's "Music for Strings, Celesta, Harp and Percussion"; and experiencing these two works probably amounted to the most important musical experience up to that point.

Back at school I was submitted for a Choral Scholarship, which - though I was not told at the time - could have got me into a top music academy had I passed. I was hopeless at sight-reading and one needed to pass every element of the exam, as with the driving test. The one thing I gained was from having to analyse a piece of classical music and write an essay on it: the piece chosen for me was Beethoven's Fifth, and so I was able to learn all about sonata form (development sections and all that), themes and variations, scherzos and trios, and rondeau finales. I already knew about fugue form from al LP of Bach organ works and Britten's "Young Person's Guide". The next important stage was access, at age 15, to the school record library, which included the final part of HMV's The History of Music - the modern era, subdivided into Impressionism (excerpts of Debussy and Falla), Late Romanticism (early Schoenberg, Strauss, Reger and Scriabin), Anti-Romantic Reaction [sic] (Satie, Stravinsky, Janacek and Bartok (hmmm), Twelve-Tone Serialism (Schoenberg, Dallapiccola) and Modern Eclecticism (Roussel, Shostakovitch, Rawsthorne, can't remember who else) which talked in general uncontextualised ways about stylistic differences, but at least illustrated the sheer range of 20th century music. I also recall taking out LPs of music by Schoenberg, Elisabeth Lutyens, Matyas Seiber, Humphrey Searle, and the first, second, fifth and sixth Bartok string quartets, and just listening and listening to them lover and over again until they made complete sense in their own right and in terms of what I had learned "academically".

This was also the time when jazz briefly went through a period of commercial success - first in the Trad Boom, then Gilberto/Bossa Nova - and I crossed the dangerous rubicon from New Orleans and Swing to Bebop, Cool and Hard Bop, forfeiting my greatest friendship with a guy who played great drums and, incidentally, became roady to Sonny and Cher! - Free Jazz appreciation came much, much later. I'd been put off "modern jazz" initially bey being introduced via Dave Brubeck, who we 15-year olds thought anathematic to swing and beyond the pale, until being introduced to Dizzy Gillespie by a cousin who influenced me in terms of dress codes and "pose"! and Charlie Parker, who, as in the case of Ronnie Scott, represented the next step I'd been seeking for after Benny Goodman. So these things ran in parallel, rather than being mutually related in my mind. I was a musical snob, only briefly interested in pop in order to fit in with my fellow 14-year old contemporaries, and jazz had come to my rescue as being at the "intelligent" end of some popularity scale of importance. I joined the school jazz club - thrilling visits to see "King Kong" and "Black Nativity" - my intro to Gospel music: I'd already heard Ray Charles - also to see Ella Fitzgerald and the Oscar Peterson Trio at the Finsbury Circus Odeon, and Duke Ellington at the Hammersmith ditto. By which time Duke was "old fashioned" in my terms!!! After leaving school, leaving home on very bad terms to move to London and jobs in catering, Ronnies in Gerrard St was first port of call to experience the visiting Americans, but to expensive for regularity, and I went twice to the Flamingo in Wardour Street. One witnessed pop music aspiring to higher aesthetic realms as represented by "Sergent Pepper", followed avant-garde music developments on Radio 3 and frequented The Proms in the Glock era when one could experience Boulez conducting the iconic modernist pioneer works as well as Schuller conducting Ives 4; also attending the Festival Hall: Thelonious Monk Qt, Boulez/Le sacre. By '67 there was exciting new British stuff at Ronnie's "Old Place" - Westbrook's Sextet with Ozzy and Surman, Graham Collier Music - but I hadn't yet come to terms with Free Jazz and what one heard of the new Free Improv and the direction jazz was taking, ie converging with rock music, seemed - sadly for me at that time - to represent the end of jazz as it got absorbed into other fields. I only got into Miles ca 1970, Headhunters and Mahavishnu around '73-'74 when I was semi communally living and they were listened to alongside Pink Floyd and the emerging Krautrock bands: I mistily recall naked bodies including my own writhing around a large sitting room furnished with huge cushions for safe landings to Stockhausen's "Hymnen"!!!

I had ideas about writing a book intended to popularise 20th century classical music and dedicating it to a girl I was desperately in love with from afar, in part because she too was interested musically in what I was (interested in!), 200+ pages of which I later binned: an uinsatisfactory piece of work in that it transitioned from presenting music in purely technical terms to an emerging Marxist perspective, though I wasn't consciously aware of that being the case at the time. Involved as I became in left wing activism from between 1973 and 1984 precluded any time for musical appreciation, music becoming a background noise at parties, and not to be taken up again until the mid-80s, initially as an antidote to political disillusionment in the wake of the miners' defeat. Later one discovers an interconnectedness between interests that had once seemed unrelated. That's about it, really.

[Joseph K]

In all cases, I let myself be led to fresh fields because I trusted another person enough to exchange ideas, and to follow suggestions.

That's good. I've never experienced a relationship or friendship like that. But I have always been curious about the whole history of European music and music from across the world; I remember talking to a girl with whom I remember waiting outside the lecturer's study who was about to interview me for a place at the music department at Bangor (where I ended up going) she was already doing a degree there and I asked her something about what she was studying and she mentioned something about isorhythm, and that to me was quite a cool sounding word, and that it was medieval, a music I had never heard, was another plus point. And when I finally got round to hearing it, that was great - I don't think I studied isorhythm specifically, but I definitely took a course called The Art of Courtly Love about secular song in the 14th/15th centuries. Actually, it's possible we looked at isorhythm in the second year composition module, run by Andrew Lewis, it was an excellent module.

Anyway, I have always been very curious and open about these things, though my tastes have narrowed in certain respects these days, overall it's still quite broad.

[Joseph K]

In a kind of naive wonderment, in my case! I had the good fortune to be born into musically relatively literate family circumstances - my mother a brilliant and at one time professional pianist with an abiding love for music of the early Romantic period, chiefly Schumann, Mendelssohn and Chopin; my father less pianistically gifted, as he ruefully recognised, but more open to other eras and styles than Mum, as reflected in his collection of 78s and, as I grew up, LPs. Though his lifelong favourites always remained Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Elgar and Vaughan Williams, he opened my ears to a few composers he (b. 1908) in common with his generation, thought of as "modern". Being in the school choir, and later heading it, exposed me to composers such as Tallis, Purcell and Howells, and through them to modal as opposed to diatonically founded music, and I remember first thinking of modally-shaped harmonic and polyphonic movements as being "wrong", a consequence of the strength of major-minor diatonic norms of tension and resolution in shaping one's feelings and expectations of narrative, conflict and fulfilment. Starting out, in my head, appreciating simple cyclic forms such as Strauss waltz sequences, I could quickly remember which theme followed which, and by the age of seven I could accurately recall the Schumann piano concerto from start to finish in my head.

Thus it was harmony more than anything else that won my attention and kept me interested: I grew increasingly intrigued by the "strange harmonies" I was hearing in composers ranging from Rimsky-Korsakov to Holst and Delius, my only possible sources of reference; I can remember at about the age of 12 a music class in which we were introduced to Debussy's "La mer", and being captivated more by its unexpected harmonic twists, "traps", and Debussy's unpredictable ways of escaping them, than its new orchestral colours and combinations. At that stage the only Schoenberg I had heard, (I hadn't heard any Berg or Webern at that stage), I had been unable to make any sense of: it was only later, hearing "Verklaerte Nacht", that I was struck that there must have been some change or evolution that had led from the one to the other. This was helped by having visited a Picasso exhibition while on a summer exchange to France, where by exhibiting the paintings chronologically one could see how he had developed from naturalism by way of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Cubism, and make sense out of the latter: something in parallel must have taken place to bring about "modern music". Dad bought his first stereo hi-fi when I was 13; we went to the local record shop and I was given partial carte blanche to choose new recordings. One was Monteux conducting "Le Sacre"; another Bartok's "Music for Strings, Celesta, Harp and Percussion"; and experiencing these two works probably amounted to the most important musical experience up to that point.

Back at school I was submitted for a Choral Scholarship, which - though I was not told at the time - could have got me into a top music academy had I passed. I was hopeless at sight-reading and one needed to pass every element of the exam, as with the driving test. The one thing I gained was from having to analyse a piece of classical music and write an essay on it: the piece chosen for me was Beethoven's Fifth, and so I was able to learn all about sonata form (development sections and all that), themes and variations, scherzos and trios, and rondeau finales. I already knew about fugue form from al LP of Bach organ works and Britten's "Young Person's Guide". The next important stage was access, at age 15, to the school record library, which included the final part of HMV's The History of Music - the modern era, subdivided into Impressionism (excerpts of Debussy and Falla), Late Romanticism (early Schoenberg, Strauss, Reger and Scriabin), Anti-Romantic Reaction [sic] (Satie, Stravinsky, Janacek and Bartok (hmmm), Twelve-Tone Serialism (Schoenberg, Dallapiccola) and Modern Eclecticism (Roussel, Shostakovitch, Rawsthorne, can't remember who else) which talked in general uncontextualised ways about stylistic differences, but at least illustrated the sheer range of 20th century music. I also recall taking out LPs of music by Schoenberg, Elisabeth Lutyens, Matyas Seiber, Humphrey Searle, and the first, second, fifth and sixth Bartok string quartets, and just listening and listening to them lover and over again until they made complete sense in their own right and in terms of what I had learned "academically".

This was also the time when jazz briefly went through a period of commercial success - first in the Trad Boom, then Gilberto/Bossa Nova - and I crossed the dangerous rubicon from New Orleans and Swing to Bebop, Cool and Hard Bop, forfeiting my greatest friendship with a guy who played great drums and, incidentally, became roady to Sonny and Cher! - Free Jazz appreciation came much, much later. I'd been put off "modern jazz" initially bey being introduced via Dave Brubeck, who we 15-year olds thought anathematic to swing and beyond the pale, until being introduced to Dizzy Gillespie by a cousin who influenced me in terms of dress codes and "pose"! and Charlie Parker, who, as in the case of Ronnie Scott, represented the next step I'd been seeking for after Benny Goodman. So these things ran in parallel, rather than being mutually related in my mind. I was a musical snob, only briefly interested in pop in order to fit in with my fellow 14-year old contemporaries, and jazz had come to my rescue as being at the "intelligent" end of some popularity scale of importance. I joined the school jazz club - thrilling visits to see "King Kong" and "Black Nativity" - my intro to Gospel music: I'd already heard Ray Charles - also to see Ella Fitzgerald and the Oscar Peterson Trio at the Finsbury Circus Odeon, and Duke Ellington at the Hammersmith ditto. By which time Duke was "old fashioned" in my terms!!! After leaving school, leaving home on very bad terms to move to London and jobs in catering, Ronnies in Gerrard St was first port of call to experience the visiting Americans, but to expensive for regularity, and I went twice to the Flamingo in Wardour Street. One witnessed pop music aspiring to higher aesthetic realms as represented by "Sergent Pepper", followed avant-garde music developments on Radio 3 and frequented The Proms in the Glock era when one could experience Boulez conducting the iconic modernist pioneer works as well as Schuller conducting Ives 4; also attending the Festival Hall: Thelonious Monk Qt, Boulez/Le sacre. By '67 there was exciting new British stuff at Ronnie's "Old Place" - Westbrook's Sextet with Ozzy and Surman, Graham Collier Music - but I hadn't yet come to terms with Free Jazz and what one heard of the new Free Improv and the direction jazz was taking, ie converging with rock music, seemed - sadly for me at that time - to represent the end of jazz as it got absorbed into other fields. I only got into Miles ca 1970, Headhunters and Mahavishnu around '73-'74 when I was semi communally living and they were listened to alongside Pink Floyd and the emerging Krautrock bands: I mistily recall naked bodies including my own writhing around a large sitting room furnished with huge cushions for safe landings to Stockhausen's "Hymnen"!!!

I had ideas about writing a book intended to popularise 20th century classical music and dedicating it to a girl I was desperately in love with from afar, in part because she too was interested musically in what I was (interested in!), 200+ pages of which I later binned: an uinsatisfactory piece of work in that it transitioned from presenting music in purely technical terms to an emerging Marxist perspective, though I wasn't consciously aware of that being the case at the time. Involved as I became in left wing activism from between 1973 and 1984 precluded any time for musical appreciation, music becoming a background noise at parties, and not to be taken up again until the mid-80s, initially as an antidote to political disillusionment in the wake of the miners' defeat. Later one discovers an interconnectedness between interests that had once seemed unrelated. That's about it, really.

Thank you, SA, for this extensive autobiographical note! Fascinating - I am sorry to hear you felt that way about a book you'd written!

I feel a sort of tug in the direction of activism, but my dedication to practising guitar holds me back - though what I could do with it I'm not sure, since I tend to get nervous even just filming myself, let alone actually performing to an audience, so the best I could do with in is to get very good, film myself playing a difficult piece very well and use it to advertise myself as a guitar teacher. But I toy now and again with composition, something I can play on the guitar, despite my right-hand technique being only at the early stage of development...

[RichardB]

Thanks JK for starting this thread which I hope will set off a few fruitful thoughts. It's something I often think about because for whatever reason the exploration of unknown musical regions has always been irresistibly attractive to me. I should say first that I don't come from a musical or culturally sophisticated or otherwise privileged background. There was neither a piano nor a record player in the house where I grew up. My parents both left school at 16. It's this circumstance that allows me to say that an appreciation of music that some might think of as arcane has nothing to do with an elitist education or bourgeois social environment. I became interested in "classical" music at around the age of 12, I have no idea how this happened, and learned about it by going to the local record library every Friday evening after school. I was choosing things to take home and listen to more or less at random, it didn't take long before I encountered the music of composers like Stockhausen and Xenakis, and there was nobody to tell me that some music was difficult and other music wasn't. At least I never found it difficult in any way. As time went on I also learned much about music from Radio 3. These years were the decisive moment in my musical education. As a result I've never really grasped what people mean when they say they find some music or other hard to understand. Of course not all music can be completely taken in at first listening, and of course I would hope I understand more music much more deeply than when I was a teenager, when I used to imagine music that I then had no ability to write down (and if I could it probably wouldn't have sounded anything like as wonderful as I thought it did in my mind!)

So what I believe in when it comes to encouraging others to expand their tastes is firstly the sharing of enthusiasm and secondly not necessarily taking what might seem to be a "logical" route from the familiar to the unfamiliar, say from Mahler to Schoenberg to Webern to Boulez or whatever. I have never really appreciated Schoenberg, except in obviously admiring the originality and profundity of his work. I will defend his music to the hilt in an argument against people who dismiss it out of hand but it doesn't really have a place in my heart, and not appreciating Schoenberg is no barrier whatever to appreciating the more radical composers of succeeding generations.

So, I don't think there's such a thing as "difficult" or "inaccessible" music, and I don't think lack of a specialised education is a barrier to expanding musical tastes, and I derive these opinions from my own experience. And I would never want to get to the point where I think my musical tastes are fully formed and "I know what I like and I like what I bloody well know".

[Joseph K]

Thanks JK for starting this thread which I hope will set off a few fruitful thoughts. It's something I often think about because for whatever reason the exploration of unknown musical regions has always been irresistibly attractive to me. I should say first that I don't come from a musical or culturally sophisticated or otherwise privileged background. There was neither a piano nor a record player in the house where I grew up. My parents both left school at 16. It's this circumstance that allows me to say that an appreciation of music that some might think of as arcane has nothing to do with an elitist education or bourgeois social environment. I became interested in "classical" music at around the age of 12, I have no idea how this happened, and learned about it by going to the local record library every Friday evening after school. I was choosing things to take home and listen to more or less at random, it didn't take long before I encountered the music of composers like Stockhausen and Xenakis, and there was nobody to tell me that some music was difficult and other music wasn't. At least I never found it difficult in any way. As time went on I also learned much about music from Radio 3. These years were the decisive moment in my musical education. As a result I've never really grasped what people mean when they say they find some music or other hard to understand. Of course not all music can be completely taken in at first listening, and of course I would hope I understand more music much more deeply than when I was a teenager, when I used to imagine music that I then had no ability to write down (and if I could it probably wouldn't have sounded anything like as wonderful as I thought it did in my mind!)

Thank you for replying, Richard! I've highlighted a phrase in the above paragraph that I'd like to discuss (about finding some music or other hard to grasp). In the bit of text of yours I quote in the original post of this thread you say that 19th century music was one of the last eras of music for you to come around to - would you say that this was a question of not understanding it before, or just that it wasn't to your taste, and also (importantly) how did you get to like it. What I'm after is strategies to illuminate one's blind-spots. Was it the enthusiasm of colleagues or friends, or particular recordings? etc.

So what I believe in when it comes to encouraging others to expand their tastes is firstly the sharing of enthusiasm and secondly not necessarily taking what might seem to be a "logical" route from the familiar to the unfamiliar, say from Mahler to Schoenberg to Webern to Boulez or whatever. I have never really appreciated Schoenberg, except in obviously admiring the originality and profundity of his work. I will defend his music to the hilt in an argument against people who dismiss it out of hand but it doesn't really have a place in my heart, and not appreciating Schoenberg is no barrier whatever to appreciating the more radical composers of succeeding generations.

You're right - the idea that appreciating earlier composers as a prerequisite to liking later ones is an idea we shouldn't push, I totally agree with that. At the same time, I still think it can do no harm to learn about music that one might not take to right away - the human mind works in odd ways, and I would still advise someone who unlike yourself doesn't take to the High Modernist composers straight away to check out where they were coming from - even though someone like Messiaen was seemingly outside of music history in his approach, and that among others in the post-WWII era were dealing with a kind of 'ground zero'.

So, I don't think there's such a thing as "difficult" or "inaccessible" music, and I don't think lack of a specialised education is a barrier to expanding musical tastes, and I derive these opinions from my own experience. And I would never want to get to the point where I think my musical tastes are fully formed and "I know what I like and I like what I bloody well know".

I'd like to know what do you think - in your experience - is a barrier to expanding musical tastes?

Thanks again.

[Joseph K]

While I can't go into detail about all the ins and outs of my tastes over the years - or perhaps I'd find it too time-consuming - but I'll start typing and see where it takes me... I'm told there is a picture of me asleep as a four year old with headphones on, and I know I must have been around this age when I basically took possession of the tape of the soundtrack to the film Buster. A little later, I must have been around 8 years old, I remember being moved to tears by the beauty of Holst's 'Jupiter' from the planets suite, specifically the melody 'I Vow to Thee, My Country' - fortunately it was in the dark since this was in First school where we were watching like a animated video which used that music. A bit later, perhaps a year or two later I remember listening to Jimi Hendrix' 'Voodoo Child' (another tape of my mum's I ended up taking possession of) through headphones and it being mind-blowing, and experiencing a special feeling through my head. Around this time I started playing guitar.
So into my early teens I was mostly interested rock and even some pop and rap music. I had a couple of grandparents (one of whom is still alive) who listen(ed) to classical music but not really in too much of an enthusiastic way to affect me, although later on I did make tape recordings of some of their CDs. I must have been about 15 (2002/2003) and oddly enough I remember reading an article in the NME about some classical composers! And I'd read articles about Radiohead where they mentioned Miles Davis and Messiaen as influences. I'd read about these and others online and would browse HMV classical and jazz sections and around this time I started a paper round so I could buy CDs. Then I chose to do music as one of my GCSEs - not having been taught how to read music from the guitar lessons I had at school, I taught myself. Another moment sticks out for me around this time - I stayed after school to do extra help for my music GCSE, although I think it was also for people who wanted to go on to do A-level (I was also very fond of my music teacher ). The music example was from the first Turangalila movement from the symphony of that name and upon hearing it I was so excited - it sounded incredible, and I knew that its texture was heterophony, which was the question.
At some point I remember reading Harold Schoenberg's 'The Lives of the Great Composers' in its entirety - readable at that age, even if in hindsight it indulged a bit in caricature. Into my A-level years by this point I had started classical guitar, on which I love(d) playing Bach. In terms of taste I liked the Baroque (Bach) and Romanticism a lot, modern music a great deal, but like I mentioned in the original post, music of the Classical era was a bit of a blind-spot and funnily enough, our music teacher didn't choose any music from that era for us to study - maybe I got it from her? But I thought Mozart was kind of like light background music - I knew Beethoven at this point, having bought some of his piano music from the HMV Classics label where perforce I got most if not all my music of that kind from at this point.
Into my university years and most of the aforementioned tendencies continue developing. But I'll leave it there since I'm already behind my guitar-practice schedule, having written this! ...

[ahinton]

Rather like RichardB, I was raised in a relatively music-free zone and only discovered its existence properly aged 11 courtesy of the life-changing experience of listening to John Ogdon playing Chopin's Fourth Ballade but, after then getting my ears around a handful of works by Roussel (3rd and 4th symphonies), Ravel (Daphnis, Piano Trio, Mallarmé songs), Stravinsky (Firebird) I went to a teacher who'd been a Webern pupil just before WWII and got immersed in the world of Darmstadt and thought nothing particularly odd about this at the time, perhaps because I'd not been previously conditioned by having encountered Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven Schumann, Brahms et al. I realised later that this was not a common experience when later absorbing Schönberg, Mahler, Bruckner, Wagner, &c. I think that part of the issue here might therefore be related to some sort of conditioning and the expectations to which this can give rise, rather than acceptance of what's there and then making decisions separately from this in terms of what does and does not appeal and why. Just my two (or less) cents' worth...

[Belgrove]

My criteria for exploring anew is not consciously based on form, category or lineage, but rather colour, literally so being a synaesthetic. I thought everyone experienced colours when listening to music, and was rather surprised, when mentioned, that others didn’t. It was this revelation through which I learned that I experienced music differently to most. I later learned that my synaesthesia is rather different from the usual too, not being related to pitch but rather harmony, orchestration and instruments. This then informs the music I listen to, through seeking that extra-sensory sensation that different types of music induce. Eighteenth Century Classical (and Rock) music is largely monochromatic, and so is intrinsically ‘dull’ (unless I’m in the mood for a particular colour), whereas the Baroque and Romantic eras are considerably more colourful. The Twentieth Century onwards explodes in colour, through the myriad harmonic and orchestral effects it employs. Opera is an overwhelming experience, where the visual impact of the stage picture and the colour sensation reinforce (and sometimes clash). But ‘more’ is not necessarily more - the colours in chamber music and small ensemble jazz are perhaps the most delicate but harmonious. Sadly, the intensity is diminishing with age.

[Joseph K]

Thank you for everyone's contributions to this thread.