Let’s begin at the beginning.
My earliest memories of classical music aren’t particular extraordinary: a foggy recollection of watching a shadow puppet play set to Stravinsky’s The Firebird; a 4th of July concert featuring Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture; family cassette tapes of Pachelbel’s Canon in D and John Williams’s score to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was the Canon that would prove the most auspicious for me as an uncommonly serious 10-year-old, and I remember sitting in the imagined solitude of a cardboard “fort” I built in my family’s living room, listening over and over to Pachelbel’s captivating melodies on my portable tape deck. I was in love.
I soon knew that I wanted to make music as beautiful as the Canon. I asked my mom to sign me up for violin lessons, and she was eager to support my interest with a rented violin and weekly lessons at a nearby music store. I certainly didn’t know it at the time, but I was just beginning my lifelong adventures in classical music.
Over the next year I would learn the very basics of the violin while slowly opening my ears to music that would change my life. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor. Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien. Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser (even if I couldn’t pronounce it). As my skills as a musician grew, so did my love for the music, and the rest of my childhood would be spent practicing, listening, reading, and obsessively thinking about classical music.
I don’t know why Pachelbel’s Canon affected me so deeply — many people hear the same music and it never goes any further than an occasional listen or maybe including it in their wedding — but I’m so grateful it did. The musical journey that started when I was 10 years old has been, decades later, the most profound and fulfilling experience of my life. This website aims to capture that experience in articles, essays, photos, and the music itself in hopes of sharing and growing a mutual love for this artform.
Welcome to Classical.me: adventures in classical music.