Another geek type?

Listening to the "Carmen Suite #2" on the online radio station I listen to at work, it strikes me there's another group of people who would be construed as geeks in this modern world:

Classical music fans.

I LOVE classical music (so much, in fact, that I feel compelled to refer to it as "classical music senso lato" or "what the rest of the world class classical music." because, really, there's Renaissance, and Baroque, and Classical, and Romantic, and Modern, and probably some other subtypes I'm either forgetting or don't know because I'm not as hardcore as some classical-music people. "True classical" roughly starts with Mozart and, I'd guess, ends perhaps about 1850-1860. Guys like Haydn and Beethoven, that sort of thing.)

But I am a big geek about it. I'm pretty much the only person I know who really likes it - I mean, likes it well enough to make it my internet-radio selection, and who can rattle off the merits of different conductors/ensembles. And I'm someone who cares about the period instrument/modern instrument debate.

I guess I'm kind of what would have been called a "longhair" back in the 30s or 40s (Though I don't know that that ever applied to women; it was mostly a reference to men in the Romantic movement who grew their hair long, like Liszt did.)

(I think it's funny that I - a baby of A.D. 1969 - knows and likes the term "longhair" as applied to an aficionado of classical music)

I guess I'm also a bit of what you might have once called a Highbrow..

And not just because I have a "five-head*," either.


(*jocular term for someone with a high forehead: "it's too much to be a FORE-head, it must be a FIVE-head." And yeah, I do have a "five-head." I wear bangs to cover it up as much as possible.)


I think it's because of my parents. My dad grew up listening to the New York Philharmonic on the radio; after he and my mom married one of their major forms of entertainment was attending their college campus' productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas or going to the many classical concerts on campus. They always had classical records and operettas/"better" musicals' records around the house - as a kid, I listened to things like "The Student Prince" and I knew most of the Strauss waltzes before I was out of grade school.

We went to see "The Nutcracker" every Christmas and both my brother and I got taken to classical concerts (we grew up near a major summer outdoor venue for one of the premiere U.S. orchestras) and even to operas. (I saw "La Traviata" at about eight - it was really because my parents had tickets, my brother was sick, and so my dad took me because my mom was home caring for my brother. But still.)

I didn't listen to the local Top 40 station (except when I was trying desperately to "fit in."); I listened to the classical channel.

It was another thing that made me a Big Geek in high school - but you know, now, as an adult, I'm glad I had that early exposure. I'm glad for my particular musical preference as the classical music has brought me a lot of joy in my life. I love Hadyn and enjoy Bach (both father and sons). I have a fondness for a lot of the British 20th century composers who wrote in a folksong idiom or who wrote for the stage or the movies.


But I do think my parents were what you would have termed "highbrows" - from a lot of their "early married" stories, the things they did for fun. The stuff they knew. The books they had and read. It almost seems like a Golden Age to me, to hear about it - a time when being well-informed and a Person of Taste was seen as a good thing, rather than snobbery.