'Everything's so clear to me now. I'm the King of the Cheese, and you're the Lemon Merchant.'
The gloriously bizarre Ren and Stimpy
Right, classical fans. All the cool, popular people have had their chance to swap stories about how they turned on the radio one day, heard some life-changing guitar riff and suddenly realised they loved cool, popular music. ("We're not after coolness," said Michael Hann in his post, though I don't see anyone naming Chris de Burgh as a formative influence.)
But what about us saddos at the back of the class? How did we come to develop our obsession for that deeply unfashionable music we call classical?
Allow me to kick off the reminiscences. I was a teenager in 1990s New Zealand and times were tough. At high school, my friends all listened to what they called alternative music ("alternative to music" was my grumpy appraisal), and bands like the Violent Femmes, the Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails all featured heavily on their personal playlists. They seemed to have a special reverence for songs which contained the word "fuck" - especially if it appeared in the song's title. The big rebels.
Me, I was into Dvořák and Schubert. None of Schubert's lieder contained the word fuck - clearly an oversight on Schubert's part - and Dvořák guitar riffs were, quite frankly, rubbish. Indeed, openly to admit a taste for orchestral music at the age of fourteen was a little like openly admitting to wetting the bed, or owning a Care Bear. Uncool, dude. Very uncool.
The seeds for my aberrant tastes had been sown a couple of years earlier. I had become a big fan of something that, remarkably enough, was pretty cool: John Kricfalusi's eye-poppingly sick and surreal Nickelodeon cartoon Ren and Stimpy. Ah, Ren and Stimpy: what halcyon days those were, spent as they were in the company of a psychotic Mexican Chihuahua, his "bloated sack" of a feline companion, and an assortment of stogie-chewing mudskippers, anthropomorphic horses and rubber nipple salesmen. Not to mention a whole heap of classical music.
You see, John K's genius was to save on royalty payments by using a variety of stock recordings for his soundtracks, mostly drawn from old 1950s films and crackly classical 78s. It was the latter that caught my attention. My dad knew a bit of classical music, so I started quizzing him about those familiar tunes that kept punctuating the gleeful, grotesque ultra-violence onscreen. "That", he would say after I'd hummed him a few bars, "is the Peer Gynt suite by Grieg". He had it on tape somewhere, so I was able to dig it out and play it on the stereo.
I came to greatly enjoy that first Peer Gynt suite. So much so that after school one day, when no-one else was home, I turned the volume right up and popped the tape in, hoping to be blasted by the not-very-hardcore strains of Morning Mood. There were a few seconds of silence while the tape wound itself into position. Then: a quiet rumbling, starting in the floorboards and gradually progressing up through my legs until I could feel my ribcage vibrating. And then suddenly an almighty BANG! rang out, rattling the entire house and causing me to jump about a foot in the air.
I panicked: it must be an air raid. Was that even possible in 1990s New Zealand? But wait - wasn't that a piano? A very, very loud piano, but a piano nonetheless?
It transpired that I'd put the tape in the wrong way round and inadvertently stumbled upon the timpani roll and crashing cadenza that opens Grieg's A minor Piano Concerto. Or at least, I had inadvertently discovered what the opening of Grieg's Piano Concerto sounds like when you turn the volume on your stereo to its highest level and let rip. It was thrilling.
From then, I was hooked. I began devouring Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Mussorgsky.
I bought a music dictionary, learned about sonata form, the symphony, the string quartet. I learned to play the piano and began to compose. Eventually, I let my friends in on my dirty little secret and found that they too quite liked the odd morsel of Ravel or Rachmaninoff in amongst their usual diet of Radiohead and Rage Against the Machine.
Ultimately, I embraced my love for the serious stuff and went off to university to study it, and there I met a whole bunch of people who were just like me - defiantly uncool and completely unembarrassed by their classical fandom. It was enormously liberating.
So, Ren and Stimpy and Grieg - that's my story. I'm pretty sure it's no-one else's, so fess up: how did your journey from normal, well-adjusted human being to classical music fan begin? Don't hold back guys - remember, we're all uncool here.
