Will Fly, I can pinpoint my wide interest in music to the same sources: 78 rpm records and the radio, although I wasn't introduced to classical music until kindergarten. We had a wonderful teacher who organised the whole school into a "band" with xylophones, tambourines, castanets, and other bits and bobs, but we also were given a music appreciation lesson, maybe once a week, with the help of the ABC school radio programmes.

I used to say I like all kinds of music, except opera and country & western, but now I even have some faves in those genres. I'm not really fond of hip-hop and rap, though. I like a good melody.

Tunesmith said: "The big problem with not being able to appreciate classical music is too much exposure to simple music that doesn't challenge the senses at all."

I agree. It's one of the reasons why I like an electronic duo called Leftfield. I have all of their CD's and I have been playing them over and over since I bought the first CD called Leftism in about 1996. It's the complexity and the interwoven musical threads which keeps me interested, and I can still hear things that I haven't noticed before. I refer to their style as electro-percussion because they both started out as drummers. There is a strong African influence, too.

E.g. Leftfield's track Storm 3000 starts slow and builds and changes, through multiple expressions until the end.

Also, they rework their tracks and release new versions, building on the original and creating a new evolved version.

This isn't off-topic. I listen to Leftfield for the same reason I listen to some classical pieces. It challenges my musical brain.

Helen