Okay, here's some music that I really LIKE

Let me put it this way: at 52 I'm beginning to understand how my English 105 instructor at Southwestern College, Don Baird, felt 35 years ago.

Mr. Baird, as curmudgeonly a teacher as I ever had, was a devoted music lover. Had been most of his life. He used to sometimes bring records into class to illustrate things for us. For example, when discussing the difference between classicism and romanticism, he brought in a Haydn string quartet and contrasted it with a quintet by Brahms. It was clear, however, that by the age of 45 or 50 or whatever age he was in 1974, Baird preferred Haydn to Brahms. He preferred the classical period to the romantic period in general. In fact he tended to sneer at romanticism. Some of his students didn't understand why. The seventies were the decade of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Love Story. Rod McKuen's poetry. Hermann Hesse in every college kid's book bag. Many students, who considered themselves "romantics" as the "Me" Decade understood the word, were offended by his tendency to dismiss the entire romantic movement in the arts as the equivalent of an orgiastic wing-ding that produced little of any lasting value.

But history has shown it to be true generally that romanticism is a youthful thing. In general, the older you get the more "classical" your tastes become. Baird preferred Haydn to Brahms. He wanted no part of Chopin. In fact, just about everything over-the-top rhetorically or idiosyncratically had been ejected from his ken. He wasn't even interested in James Joyce anymore. He preferred Tolstoy to Joyce, Pope to Wordsworth. He still revered Beethoven, but dismissed Prokofiev -- and most 20th century music -- as sounding "like tuning up."

In other words, he'd become an old fart.

I've arrived there myself. I'm not quite where he was; I will listen to music written after 1850. But I've just about had it with the high romantics. These days my listening tends to veer between the very old and the somewhat-recent ("somewhat recent," in classical music terms, means within the last 100 years.) These days I'm likely to vacillate between Guillaume Dufay and Webern, Handel and Stravinsky. Let the radio hit me with the Grieg A Minor Piano Concerto and I'm going to reach down and change the station.

Last month I posted an essay in which I outlined my history as a fan of classical music, which at the end included a list of some 30 pieces of music I've gotten so sick and tired of over the past 35 years that I wouldn't care if I never heard them again. The old war-horses. The chestnuts. And not all, but most of them are -- guess what! -- 19th century romantic war-horses. The ones that you always seem to see on symphony concert programs because most symphony orchestras are so scared of scaring away their subscriber base that they assume people want to hear the same stuff again and again. (Also, I'm sure, there are plenty of orchestra musicians out there who are just lazy about learning new pieces os music.)

Still ... as I wrapped up that essay, I also noted that I could cite at least one piece of music by each and every one of those composers that I love dearly and will never tire of, no matter how many times I hear them, or at least have not tired of them yet.

In the interest of not sounding all curmudgeonly, grumpy-poo and constipated all the time, here is a thumbs-up list of pieces by those same composers, most of them romantics but one of them actually Mozart himself, who were on the never-want-to-hear-again list a few weeks ago:

Mendelssohn: Any and all of his "string symphonies"

Berlioz: "Roman Carnival" Overture.

Brahms: String Quintet op. 111

Beethoven: String Quartet op. 131

Tchaikovsky: Second String Quartet

Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

Mozart: String quartet No. 15 in D minor

Mozart: Symphony No. 39 in E-flat

Mussorgsky: "Dawn On The Moscow River" from "Khovanschina"

Mussorgsky: The Coronation Scene from "Boris Godonov."

Grieg: Lyric Pieces

Chopin: Scherzo No. 2

Mozart: Divertimento in F, K. 138

Mozart: The two "Serenades for Winds"

Beethoven: Missa Solemnis

Gershwin: Anything of his sung by Ella Fitzgerald

Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5 (When I heard this piece on the radio for the very first time, J.D. Steyers, the deejay on KFSD in San Diego who played it, said he thought the last movement "One of the most exciting moments in 20th Century music. I agreed 34 years ago and I agree now.)

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 (Yes, I know my thumbs-down list included "any symphony by Tchaikovsky," but I love this one so much I'm putting it back on the shelf.)

Tchaikovsky: The opening scene of "Eugene Onegin."

Dvorak: String Quintet in E-flat

Wagner: "Lohengrin," Prelude to Act I

Wagner: "Die Meistersinger," Prelude to Act I

Vivaldi: Lute Concerto in D

Schumann: Symphony No. 2

Weber: Overture to "Die Freischutz."

Pachelbel: Anything else but the Canon in D major

Ravel: String Quartet

Chopin: Sonata No. 3 in B minor

Dvorak: "In Nature's Realm"

Liszt: "Annees de Pelerinage," Book I

Tchaikovsky: "Italian" Capriccio

Beethoven: String Quartet op. 132

Brahms: Quintet in F minor

As with the previous list, I could add to this one. But let no one call me curmudgeon, and if music be the food of love, by all means let the radio in the kitchen play on...