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Have a musical memory that you’d like to share? Throughout the month we will post listener submitted recollections here and share a few on MPBN’s Facebook page. Send your memory to us at music@mpbn.net.CLICK HERE to hear a musical memory aired on Maine Public Radio and Maine Public ClassicalCLICK HERE to learn more about MPBN’s instrument donation projectOur listeners’ favorite music recollections:

Susan Emanuel

When I was growing up in the Sixties, my parents permitted only classical music in the house, which meant that I had to listen to pop music at friends’ houses, and one night on a car radio I was transfixed by this:

(Bob Dylan “Like a Rolling Stone”)

Ever since then, Dylan has been my favorite singer-songwriter. When I got a stereo of my own, the records I bought were folk rock albums - but also the classical music I remembered from my youth.  In my dorm room, I could get high on Dylan - or on my favorite symphony:

(Brahms, 4th - final movement?)

What did Johannes Brahms and Bob Dylan have in common? Each composer was a premiere Romantic of his century!  In subsequent decades, I try to sample local folk and indigenous pop music wherever I travel, but my "direction home” has been provided by the classical repertoire.

It seems to me, though, that most people’s musical taste gravitates to one genre or another, and most radio stations stick to either classical or pop.  But I attend both classical and folk rock concerts and I wish that more people had the catholic taste exhibited by France Musique, which will juxtapose Aretha Franklin and Anton Bruckner, and to some extent this heterogeneity lives on Maine Public Classical.

The man I married adores Brahms, and so it sometimes feels as if I have come full circle:  moved by both Brahms and Bob.

This is Susan Emanuel, a translator who lives in New Harbor.