Some of the most powerful experiences come when you least expect them, often sparked by the strangest of circumstances. My early encounters with music were no exception, (0) BUT they 1 to come much later. The war in Europe intruded, inadvertently giving me a taste for what 2 scorned as "classical" music. When I was 12, back in 1943, wartime radio broadcasts were preceded by four emphatic musical notes. 3 notes replicated the Morse code's three dots and a dash for the letter V and were conscripted as a symbol for "V for Victory", the slogan we lived with in
those troubled 4 "Who wrote 5? I once asked an aunt. "Beethoven," she said. 6 was my introduction to genius. For those, of course, were the opening notes to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. So at a tender 7, I learned there was more 8 music than 'Genie from Bizerte' and 'Besame Mucho', two of 1943's hit parade ditties.