I prefer classical music

I wonder at times how I came to prefer classical music.
It certainly wasn’t my parents.
Although they did buy a Reader’s Digest compendium of abridged classical music with their RCA 45-rpm record-player.
Remember 45s? —I still have a couple, and a turntable that will play them.
That compendium went unplayed for a long time, but in high-school, about 10 years after purchase, I began playing the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture over-and-over.
My parents were not into classical music.
Sometimes I think it was my second piano-teacher, the infamous Mrs. Dager (“day-grrr”).
Mrs. Dager was the organist at the church our family attended.
She played a Hammond B3, not a pipe-organ.
She was also the church choir-director.
My first piano-teacher was Hilda Walton, our next-door-neighbor.
She was also the Sunday-School Superintendent.
Both Mrs. Dager and Mrs. Walton were severe taskmasters.
With Mrs. Walton it was “Curve your fIngers! Pretend you have a tomato under your hand.”
She used the John Thompson books.
Mrs. Dager’s greatest thrill was to get me and my sister crying.
She had me practicing Clemente and 32nd-note arpeggios. All extremely difficult.
She wanted to make me a Billy Graham pianist; flashy chords and florid rolling improvisation.
But I was hornswoggled by Jerry Lee Lewis.
“Come on over, baby. Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on.”
Mrs. Dager arranged for me and my sister to attend a children’s concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra.
I doubt it was Eugene Ormandy, but they played Finlandia and Dvorak’s (“dvor-ZHAK;” as in “ah”) New World Symphony.
By then I was 10 or 11, and tunes therein stayed in my head a long time.
I rode my bicycle on wooded trails to both.
But in high-school, in a different state (DE) instead of south Jersey, I gravitated to the 1812 Overture.
My band-director had a hi-fi in his office with the famous Mercury LP collection.
He let me play the conclusion of 1812 over-and-over.
I got so I could predict it.
His idea was to get our concert-band to play a band version of 1812.
An adjacent high-school had won the state band competition playing 1812.
But it was impossible.
Us reeds — I played Alto Saxophone — were playing the difficult violin parts, lotsa runs.
To play it would have meant hours of practice. We weren’t interested.
I would say where I went to college had a lot to do with my eventually preferring classical music.
It was nearby Houghton College (“HO-tin;” as in “oh,” not “how” or “who”), about 70 miles south of Rochester, in Western NY.
I’ve never regretted it, although I graduated as somewhat a Ne’er-do-Well.
Houghton is an ardent religious college, and they didn’t approve of me.
But they did have a strong music program, with respectable professors who rubbed off.
Houghton had a fabulous pipe-organ in its large Chapel-Auditorium.
Every day they held a voluntary chapel service, and we students, perhaps 1,000, would sing hymns to organ accompaniment.
We were supposed to sing in unison on the last verse, and the organist, Charles Finney, would “hymn-provise.”
I never sung the last verse.
I’d stand in awe listening to Finney “hymn-provise.”
Often he’d pull it off, and sometimes he’d work himself into a corner.
Discordant chords he could’t prettily segue out of.
But most times he didn’t, and it was glorious.
I was probably the only one attracted to this — others decided he was showing off.
Chords of my own were in my head I hoped he’d play.
Which he might play, but other times he might educate me with something different but also glorious.
Most attractive was his pulling off discordances and then successfully segueing out.
And it was his pipe-organ. He designed it, designed as a baroque organ, not schmaltz.
As a result of Finney, I came to appreciate Bach.
After college, it was back to rock-n-roll, particularly Led Zeppelin.
Led Zeppelin was mostly okay, but there was stuff that was boring.
When we first got married in the late ‘60s (December of ’67), it was Led Zeppelin on my wife’s Sears phonograph, at full volume.
I had to tape quarters to the tonearm.
And WBBF AM-95 (950) on our radio.
Pop music, with rock-n-roll on the phonograph.
That lasted through the early ‘70s. I played WCMF — underground radio —in my photographic darkroom.
Joni Mitchell, The Doors, and Jimi Hendrix.
But I was tiring of it, so I started listening to WXXI, the classical-music public-radio station out of Rochester, 91.5 FM.
It was easier to take than pop-radio, as long as they didn’t play opera in the morning (which they didn’t).
I started listening to Karl Haas, and came to appreciate far more than Bach.
So now I am probably the only child in my family who prefers classical music, although my sister in south Florida, the one who accompanied me on that Philadelphia Orchestra children’s concert, plays piano and loves 1812.
My brother-in-Boston prefers country — PLINKA-PLANKA-TWANG — and I should be like him.
But I’m not.
I prefer classical music.
Too many pieces are in my head, and I know what comes next.

• Evangelist “Billy Graham.”
• The “Mercury LP Collection” was a collection of classical music — this is 1961-1962. “LP” stands for “Long-Playing,” 33&1/3 rpm vinyl records. LPs became prominent after 1962.