I began my formal musical training at age six with piano lessons, which ended at age fourteen. I was always somewhat unwilling to practice sufficiently, but toward the end of my formal training, “always somewhat” became “always.” I continued playing for many years thereafter, working on parts of Beethoven and Schubert sonatas, and on some Bach.

I began my informal musical training at about age five when I first “surfed” the New York City radio dial and found classical music. I didn’t know what I was actually listening to, but I sure was addicted to it. My addiction was aided and abetted by kids’ adventure stories on the radio, such as The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet, which used classical music as interludes between the episodic scenes. With classical music radio stations WNYC, WQXR, and, after 1945, WABF-FM (Ira Hirschmann’s wonderful brainchild), and with shellac discs and scores borrowed from the library, I began my full journey into classical music. Augmenting this were concerts at Carnegie Hall (the New York Philharmonic under Bruno Walter), Town Hall (the venue for the Busch-Serkin group and for Ira Hirschmann’s New Friends of Music), and the 92nd Street Y (for the Budapest String Quartet, and for other chamber groups). Many Saturday afternoons were spent in Manhattan’s record stores.

Concert going continued later in Boston while an undergraduate and graduate student at M.I.T. Record collecting continued, but had progressed from shellac to vinyl. I engaged in nuclear engineering neutronics to earn a living, and continued to acquire vinyl discs and then, of course, CDs. I was never a collector qua collector, however, because I only bought what I wanted to hear. I did a lot of listening, and I collected and consulted scores to augment and sometimes verify what I heard.

As a unique and memorable recording-related musical experience, at age 16 I sat at a microphone in the WABF transmitter-studio atop Manhattan’s sumptuous Hotel Pierre to announce my presentation of an unusual recording from my “personal” collection—a classical DJ-for-an-hour. This was part of a WABF series to which I was invited by the station manager based on a written application. My program consisted of Beethoven’s op. 130 Quartet, with the Grosse Fuge finale, performed by the original Budapest String Quartet. In fact, only the Grosse Fuge came from my personal collection and featured Josef Roismann (the spelling from the late 1920s) as second violin with Emil Hauser as first violin, Istvan Ipolyi (viola), and Harry Son (cello). This was the Budapest String Quartet after their second personnel change. Two of the first five movements were performed by the more original quartet, where Imre Pogany was second violin (succeeding Alfred Indig), and that set of shellac discs I borrowed for the occasion from Emil Hauser. This patched-together set of shellac discs is now available on a CD transfer: Biddulph Lab 159. Whenever I listen to this disc, I feel like a teenager in New York.