[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Yes, that’s a bit the idea, which is why I made the garden association earlier too, it’s somewhat organically grown… I like one composer, and from there, branch out and find commonalities in some other composers, which I may then also like, and then branch out again from there, and so on… and of course, sometimes something is dropped in somewhere from nowhere.

In the early 1990s I read two books that proved pivotal in my life: “What to listen for in music” by Aaron Copland and “How to read a book” by Mortimer J. Adler (in the revis. These books “unlocked” pretty much all music and all books for me. While I already enjoyed and had film scores and classical recordings at that time, Copland’s book introduced me to a lot of works “to seek out” and enabled me to really “listen” to any new piece of (classical, that’s the books orientation) music. Likewise Adler’s book, while I already enjoyed reading, encouraged me to tackle (and not be afraid of) any great book on its own terms first and on my own, and not to rely on CliffsNotes etc. These two books did a lot to further my so called “liberal education”.