Introduction

I have loved new music as far back as I remember hearing music.

When I heard, at age 3, the nursery rhymes on our RCA Victor console that played only 78-rpm platters, I loved the first time through of "Hicory dickory doc / The mouse ran up the clock." But I was ready for a different platter when the Victor Dog answered "Rrrrright!" to the narrator's question, "Right Nipper?" and the songs were finished.

After I floated home, at age 12, from the Beloit community band practices, ecstatic from the rush I got playing the trombone parts to Sousa marches that I had never heard before, I found it impossible to duplicate the feeling after the next week's practice, since we played the same marches again.

Then again, closer to age 16, when I discovered "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and other Broadway musical numbers, the "1812 Overture," the "Prelude" and "Liebestod" to Tristan, my joy turned nearly orgasmic at first hearing—and actually so for the "Liebestod." But for the second and subsequent hearings of these and the treasures from the canon of music history, my joy of the first hearing was seldom duplicated.


It wasn't that I had turned into the analyst at the subsequent hearing, but that I really loved new music or perhaps the newness of the music. This online diary records my contacts with the music that comes to me as new music. But with this different meaning of the term: it is the music that is new to me. Even a newly discovered work by Bach may well provide that jazzy, orgiastic feeling on first hearing.