You all, definitely.

Also my friend Steve, who plays "Stairway to Heaven" as a bluegrass song. And another friend who plays "Smoke on the Water" on banjo ...

The strangest musical experience I've ever had was sitting in an auditorium in Casper, Wyoming, listening to the Tibetan monks do their multi-tonal throat singing. Each man was doing about three different tones, so eight men were making 24 individual sounds. Simply astounding.

The strangest-in-a-horrible-way was when the guest composer for the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival was Charles Wuorinen and the festival musicians played the world premiere of his rendition of Dylan Thomas' "A Winter's Tale," which is lovely poetry, but not when sung in 12-tone scales full of screeching dissonance and the most unmusical music one could imagine.

One of the soprano solos, I swear to Heaven, sounded as though someone were using instruments of torture to get that lovely woman to produce such hideosities. And at her very shrillest, screechiest moment, I looked over at the museum guard standing at the back of the auditorium -- he had nothing to do with the festival, he was just hired to keep out the riffraff -- and his mouth was literally gaping with the shock and horror of it. My eye caught his and he tried quickly to recover his soldierly detachment, but it was too late. I was trying so hard not to laugh that I was making little snorting noises and then he got so amused at that that HE started chortling. And then we both were standing back at the back of the auditorium shaking with suppressed laughter and first one person, then another heard us -- and believe me, they were all in almost as much pain as the soprano -- and ... well, I had to leave the auditorium because I was afraid I was going to instigate open guffawing.

And how did that influence me? Hmmmm, well, mmmmm ... I'm pretty sure if anyone ever asked me to sing the lead in a work by Wuorinen, I'd find it really easy to decline...

ww