Random Quote

“What would you do if there were no God? Would you commit robbery, rape, and murder, or would you continue being a good and moral person? Either way the question is a debate stopper. If the answer is that you would soon turn to robbery, rape, or murder, then this is a moral indictment of your character, indicating you are not to be trusted because if, for any reason, you were to turn away from your belief in God, your true immoral nature would emerge. If the answer is that you would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God.”
by Michael Shermer

Music: a lifelong obsession

I was introduced – if that’s the right word – to music as a toddler. True, my mother had alwyas bought records and listened to the radio, but it was her habit of sitting me in front of the television for hours on end to be “entertained” by the Test Card and its music that was my first experience of solitary listening to music. I must have enjoyed it becuase, apparently, it would keep me entertained for hours, even though there were no moving images on the screen.
If you’re not old enough to know whar the Test Card was, it was a graphic displayed on the television screen when, between the morning start-up around 9 o’clock for schools programmes and the start of children’s programmes around 4, there were no programmes on. In those days, we didn’t have twenty-four hour television. Behind the Test Card was a constant stream of what was known as Light Music, orchestral pieces by composers who wrote characterful but not intellectually demanding pieces. Forgotten, even despised, since the later 1960s, it is currently being rediscovered and found to contain items of real musical worth and quality.
I am also (just) old enough to remember the impact of The Beatles. Their music and that of their imitators soon dominated the radio stations my mother would play (the pirate station Radio London was her favourite). when I was seven, my parents bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which they would use to record episodes of Top of the Pops by the primitive expedient of putting a microphone next to the television’s speaker. Of course, it would also record extraneous sounds. I recall one in which my then four-year-old brother can be heard wailing “Mummy, I want a wee-wee”.
My mother also liked the Classics. It was generally the stuff I would consider undemanding, almost easy-listening, late eighteenth- to late nineteenth-century music. Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and (especially) Tchaikovsky were her favourites; Beethoven was mostly too “heavy” (apart from the piano concertos) and, for reasons I never understood, she wasn’t interetsed in Haydn.
This was the music I grew up with and which formed the basis of my musical tastes. As a teenager, I w

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